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Art as Experience

John Dewey

3.93 · Rating details · 5,329 ratings · 100 reviews

Based on John Dewey's lectures on esthetics, delivered as the first William James Lecturer at Harvard in 1932, Art as Experience has grown to be considered internationally as the most distinguished work ever written by an American on the formal structure and characteristic effects of all the arts: architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and literature. ...more

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Paperback, 384 pages

Published July 5th 2005 by TarcherPerigee (first published 1934)

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Lists with This Book

Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

On the Aesthetic Education of Man by Friedrich Schiller

Poetry, Language, Thought by Martin Heidegger

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Feb 17, 2015 Glenn Russell rated it it was amazing

Are there times in your life that are dull and dreary, a mechanical, mindless shuffling from one tedious task to another? According to American philosopher John Dewey (1859-1952), such moments in anybody’s life lack aesthetic quality. He writes in Art as Experience, “The enemies of the aesthetic are neither the practical nor the intellectual. They are the humdrum; slackness of loose ends; submission to convention in practice and intellectual procedure.” We may ask, by Dewey’s reckoning, what wil ...more

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Feb 19, 2015 Forrest rated it it was amazing

Some labyrinths are worth descending into just to get a glimpse of the Minotaur, even if you can't yet defeat him. Art as Experience is one of those. It will require several more descents to get the clearest picture of the Minotaur and more familiarization with the territory in order to be able to face it head on. But I have seen the face of the Minotaur, and it is beautiful and terrifying. This is my attempt to follow the threads back out of the maze.

Dewey's monstrous work - and I use this as a ...more

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Apr 17, 2015 Michael rated it liked it

Shelves: philosophy, poetry, nonfiction, philosophy-analytic, art, historicity, art-theory, zz1934, aa-unitedstateslit, philosophy-american

this is a later later later addition: in just reading deleuze, there is the idea that 'art' of any sort is not necessarily the uncovering of 'truth', as in heidegger, that this revealing is neither cause nor effect, but rather sort of 'side-effect', something essential to the project, yet not a goal, idea, sense, otherwise expressible. so perhaps learning 'pragmatics' of art is useful.....

this is a later later addition: have i mistaken the relative connotations of 'pragmatic' and 'practical'- we this is a later later later addition: in just reading deleuze, there is the idea that 'art' of any sort is not necessarily the uncovering of 'truth', as in heidegger, that this revealing is neither cause nor effect, but rather sort of 'side-effect', something essential to the project, yet not a goal, idea, sense, otherwise expressible. so perhaps learning 'pragmatics' of art is useful.....

this is a later later addition: have i mistaken the relative connotations of 'pragmatic' and 'practical'- well this is a poetic question. and perhaps i am thinking of 'pragmatic' as 'programmatic', that is, something of a scheme devised before application, before writing, with given goals and limits of the possible. for me, 'practical' is simply the 'practice' of writing, the doing, the words, which do not necessarily or instrumentally achieve a set goal or form or experience- that it is always a 'try' an 'essay'...

this is a later addition: i have now read some of dewey's poetry, not enough to review, but it is the exact sort i did not like studying- poetry that is self-consciously using language that is poetic, with rhyme schemes, stanzas, apostrophes, with sentiment rather dominant, but then as admitted i have not really read much poetry so maybe it is actually considered good... though in comparison with the translated Russian work just read from the stray dog cafe in Petersburg it is very staid, very dull, very uninteresting...

first review: this is an interesting, for me very different book on the arts. most of my reading on aesthetics has been continental phenomenologists, sartre, heidegger, merleau-ponty, so the ways of investigating this subject have been far more metaphysical. this is an american pragmatist writing. this is a historical document that seems even older than 1932 though it is a collection of lectures that year, where the emblematic works of art are primarily poetry...

i do not know whether 'pragmatism' has much to do with art. 'practical' yes, in that any work requires close attention, awareness, alteration of this or that part of the object designed to encapsulate and offer an artistic experience. 'pragmatism' suggests in this word, to me, the effective-under-the-circumstances, as if there were some accepted limitation of the medium, some way this judgement, this correctness, can be measured, this possibility. 'practical' is a recognition that these aspects are malleable but specific to each experience, each work, and is rather the impossible, the unlimited, the intuitive, which any artist must discover in the process and each time no matter how similar the subject involved or means utilized...

but then, dewey is a 'pragmatist'. he starts with a metaphysics that proposes the 'live creature', the human, as both source and receiver of any work that pretends to the status of art, and gives argument why such experience is of human necessity. this is fine. this is not in dispute. then he talks of 'etherial things', 'having an experience', 'act of expression', 'expressive object', 'substance and form', 'natural history of form', 'organization of energies', 'common substance of arts', 'varied substance of arts', 'human contribution', 'challenge to philosophy', 'criticism and perception', 'art and civilization'... yes, there is a sense of great, perceptive, analytic thought, brought to bear on the experience of art, but i had some trouble shifting my mind to this inquisitive attitude. this work, this way, though he insists remains whole, an integration of subject and form, strikes me as too deliberately separated, dissected, simply in this logical dissertation...

this is partly, no doubt, that this is not the style of philosophy i find most congenial. this is not the attitude. though he is working at about the same time as heidegger's work there is a world of difference between their approaches, their assertions: though dewey insists he will be descriptive and not prescriptive, he cannot help in the examples he chooses, the approaches of both creators and critics, giving his idea of what counts as art. but this is not that poetry creates new words and thus worlds, not that art reveals any existential being, any truth, any clearing, such as is said in heidegger. this is very directly how the work of art 'works': goes from a to b, offers respite, offers something like correspondence truth, grows out of history, reflects cultures, and how we should evaluate somehow according to 'how it works'... this is pragmatism i guess...

this is good in its way, thus a three, but strikes me more as what a scientist might imagine best to address this most slippery topic of the arts: as a biologist determine your genus, your species, your population, as a chemist discover your elements, your phases, your combinations, as a physicist describe your movement, your interactions, your expressions- but this is art for a scientist. it is rather naive. while it is best in critical papers of all disciplines, to pose as disinterested, academic, impersonal- i do not know if this is possible with the arts. for though i hear that dewey did write some poetry, not published in his lifetime, this entire book, this attempt to comprehend the experience of art conflicts with my experience- and should they ever deign to read it, probably that of my artist friends...

it does not help me that the art dewey uses most in his work is poetry, and this a tradition of which i am not much familiar. not the poetry heidegger tends to in his later work, not the poetry neitzsche uses to give his philosophy, but poetry that trends along the historical line through english 'greats'. but then merleau-ponty is heavily weighted to painting, particularly cezanne, and neither thinker addresses abstract expressionism let alone pop art. (actually hd does deal with ab-x in an essay i read but forget the title) dewey does not, either, address that most synthetic art which involves so many other arts- and at least according to deleuze offers a new way of thinking- that seventh art of the cinema... if there is any art which does best fit kant's organization of thought and so judgement, there is the cinema. dewey dismisses kant early on then in fact dismisses much continental philosophy on the arts. dewey is a pragmatist...

i read once a quote by poet charles bukowski (somewhere): 'the philosopher explains something simple in a very complex way, the poet explains something complex in a very simple way'- whether you like his work or not, he is on to something there... ...more

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Jun 24, 2013 Collier Brown rated it it was amazing

Shelves: home-inventory

Why, in all my courses on aesthetics and art history, have I not been assigned this? Might it be because Dewey takes down Kant and his continental successors with a little common sense and a few grammatically legible sentences? Well, it sure doesn't hurt. I say, "legible," but that doesn't mean the reading here is not dense. Every page is work and reward; therefore, you may find yourself poking along at a snail's pace, five or ten pages at a time. I don't think Dewey's book can be read any more ...more

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Aug 31, 2012 Jason rated it it was amazing

The greatest book written by an American in the 20th Century. It's not just about aesthetics. He claims, in an even harder book to read, (I know, I know, but its worth the effort) Experience and Nature, that experience itself exhibits aesthetic characteristics (rhythm, flow, spatial and temporal relationships) and only when we understand this will we understand the nature of thinking, joy and fulfillment. This book goes with that insight and further elaborates on on the form of experience best s ...more

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Jun 28, 2007 Steven rated it really liked it

Shelves: literary-theory, philosophy, art, aesthetics

Perhaps this is anachronistic in our current mash-up culture (or maybe it isn't?), but I think writers should do some reading in aesthetic theory. Dewey's book, originally delivered as a series of lectures in 1932, is one I'd recommend, either to argue with or from which to seek inspiration. I first read this for a philosophy seminar and that kind of systematic studious reading is far different from how I read it now, which is to open it at random and read for a bit and then see where that takes ...more

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May 16, 2012 Chris Bass rated it really liked it

Every page is brilliance--seriously, I am not exaggerating. Dewey's insights and thoughts are as refreshing and relevant to us today as when the lecture was presented at Harvard (1932). As I read through the first few chapters, I found myself copying pages of each chapter to use in my classroom. He provides necessary theory to challenge and discuss the relevancy of education and function of English Education.

Nice thoughts:

"The moment of passage from disturbance into harmony is that of intense li ...more

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Jul 26, 2014 Chris Beiser rated it it was amazing

Below is a very glowing review. It's hard for me to recommend this book more. This review is fairly overwrought, because this book has given me some incredible insights, and it's made a big impact on how I see the world. It may be better for you to just stop reading, buy a copy, and struggle through it. (AAE is so dense that I was unable to read it whenever heating or air conditioning was on, because it wasn't possible for me to filter out the sound and read the book simulatenously.)

I went into Below is a very glowing review. It's hard for me to recommend this book more. This review is fairly overwrought, because this book has given me some incredible insights, and it's made a big impact on how I see the world. It may be better for you to just stop reading, buy a copy, and struggle through it. (AAE is so dense that I was unable to read it whenever heating or air conditioning was on, because it wasn't possible for me to filter out the sound and read the book simulatenously.)

I went into this book with what I would consider a good aesthetic sense, an understanding of the fundamentals of creative processes, and a set of hunches about what it means to have a cultural zeitgeist, the meaning of a medium as a communal form, etc. Today, at risk of coming off as expressing misplaced epistemological confidence, I feel fairly confident in saying that I understand what art is, and how it functions, on a fundamental level. It has changed how I see the world in a serious ways, and to a degree that's very unusual.

Many works of philosophy progress by making an argument; the world can be split into X'es and Y'es, and each of these are Z, and so forth. Dewey follows no such pattern. Though his prose is dense (so, so dense), to read it feels almost like it's been divinely handed down. I don't want to make it sound like I failed to give it a properly skeptical reception, but his logic is so clear, and fits so neatly with the experiences of creating, experiencing and thinking, that it needs no further argument.

Art as Experience was published in 1934. Dewey starts the book with a shoutout to cartoons and 'jazzed music,' which he (quite controversially for the time) calls some of the most exciting mediums of his day. It's a curious fact that despite being revered in design schools, he's only rarely been followed up on in Aesthetic philosophy. Part of this is that he's hard to read, and his approach isn't typical. But mostly, I suspect that it's because once he's done speaking, there's not much more to say. There are passages that clearly anticipate pop art and conceptual art, and unlike many aesthetic philosophies from his time, his has been strengthened, not weakened, by their arrival.

I'm struggling to find a way to close this review. Dewey might say that I have an impulsion, but (as shown by the literary-review tropes above) not mastery enough of the medium to produce a work that expresses it. I say you should buy a copy of Art As Experience. ...more

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Nov 30, 2018 Matthew John rated it really liked it

This is the most dense book I've read so far. Every page on this book provides rich perspectives on what we perceive as art, aesthetics and experience - each of them calling for a sound discussion. I particularly enjoyed the sections where Dewey defines what an experience is and at the end goes onto share his thoughts on criticism of art. This would be a great read for anyone who's curious about learning why they experience what they experience in the way they experience (in my opinion not limit ...more

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Jul 20, 2019 Illiterate rated it it was ok

Dewey nicely ties art to everyday life. But he muddies evolution with a desire for integration, adopting a soft teleology with art as intended source of fulfillment.

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Feb 13, 2017 Sharnn rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites

Dense. I love reading through this, taking time and careful reflection.

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May 16, 2014 Colleen rated it did not like it

Super verbose to the point where he'd spend pages to get to a single point. The author's writing style was also very dry and hard to wrap my head around. I had to read this for a class, and I was reading it early and I'm glad I did because I could not be able to finish this quickly. I often could only read a few pages a day and call it major progress. If I wasn't reading this for a class, I'd never ever read this book and do not recommend it. ...more

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Jun 28, 2017 Tara rated it really liked it

I slogged through this text, but after reading am thoroughly entrenched in Dewey's philosophy and theory about art as experience. Her writes in a manner that is accessible, but this material is dense and not exactly riveting. If you are reading Dewey with an academic or theoretical framework in mind, then you won't be disappointed. ...more

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Sep 15, 2008 Penny rated it really liked it

Shelves: sounding-the-infraordinary, sonic-heterotopias

"Mountain peaks do not float unsupported; they do not even just rest upon the surface. The ARE the earth in one of its manifest operations."

...more

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Dec 25, 2019 Mohammad Rezaei Niya rated it liked it

Shelves: art-critique

I believe it is a highly over-appreciated work. Dewey’s optimism (sometimes even naivety) about and appreciation of “science” and “scientific approach” and technology, his limited/biased review of philosophy literature, and reduction of definition of art to western art and most of the times only painting, cannot be easily ignored. The middle chapters are specifically more like an average art critic’s book!

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Jul 24, 2018 sam howie rated it it was amazing

I was always going to give this book 5 stars from reading bits and pieces before actually now finally reading it front to back. It is an astounding accomplishment in aesthetic theory written with two feet placed firmly on the ground, in the true pragmatist style that Dewey involved himself with. In summation, I feel, it takes or removes the magic from art and leaves only the essence, and essence is all that is ever needed to make and/or view art.

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Nov 11, 2010 Brynn rated it liked it

"Art celebrates with peculiar intensity the moments in which the past reinforces the present and in which the future is a quickening of what now is." (17)

"'Spontaneity' is the result of long periods of activity, or else it is so empty as not to be an act of expression." (75)

"There are values and meanings that can be expressed only by immediately visible and audible qualities, and to ask what they mean in the sense of something that can be put into words is to deny their distinctive existence." ( "Art celebrates with peculiar intensity the moments in which the past reinforces the present and in which the future is a quickening of what now is." (17)

"'Spontaneity' is the result of long periods of activity, or else it is so empty as not to be an act of expression." (75)

"There are values and meanings that can be expressed only by immediately visible and audible qualities, and to ask what they mean in the sense of something that can be put into words is to deny their distinctive existence." (77)

"In other words, art is not nature, but is nature transformed by entering into new relationships where it evokes a new emotional response." (82)

"Every work of art 'abstracts' in some degree from the particular traits of objects expressed. Otherwise, it would only, by means of exact imitation, create an illusion of the presence of the things themselves." (98)

"But whatever path the work of art pursues, it, just because it is a full and intense experience, keeps alive the power to experience the common world in its fullness." (138)

"Significant advances in technique occur, therefore, in connection with efforts to solve problems that are not technical but that grow out of the need for new modes of experience." (147)

"For art is a selection of what is significant, with rejection by the very same impulse of what is irrelevant, and thereby the significant is compressed and intensified." (216)

"Time as empty does not exist; time as an entity does not exist. What exists are things acting and changing, and a constant quality of their behavior is temporal." (218)

"Language comes infinitely short of paralleling the variegated surface of nature. Yet words as practical devices are the agencies by which the ineffable diversity of natural existence as it operates in human experience is reduced to orders, ranks, and classes that can be managed." (224)

"For, as we have already seen, the more a work of art embodies what belongs to experiences common to many individuals, the more expressive it is." (297)

"For masterpieces themselves can be critically appreciated only as they are placed in the tradition to which they belong." (323)

"He then misses the point of all art, the unity of form and matter, and misses it because he lacks adequate sympathy, in his natural and acquired one-sidedness, with the immense variety of interactions between the live creature and his world." (326) ...more

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May 04, 2020 Mary Connolly rated it really liked it

I wanted this to change my life.. not yet sure if it did or not. At least I am now aware that my life is lacking esthetic quality?

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Jun 03, 2014 Nelson Zagalo rated it it was amazing

Shelves: reler, communication, human_engage, top_30_non_fiction, philosophy, best_books_ever, academic, art, non-fiction

Masterpiece. Thanks John Dewey for writing this book, even more because it was written in 1934.

This should be obligatory read for anyone studying/researching Art Communication. Before the domain of Communication Sciences even existed, before Emotion Studies were seriously accepted by the academy, Dewey has written a profound and dense work on the subject of Art Experience. It was done from a philosophical approach, however Dewey, clearly influence by his Pragmatics companion, William James, the ...more

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May 16, 2019 Bảo Ngọc rated it liked it

to review later

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Jul 17, 2012 Regina Andreassen rated it it was amazing

What a wonderful book! Aesthetics, as perceived by John Dewey, is more than just philosophy; is, as Baumgarten stated, the science of perception, while Art is perhaps the most sublime expression of human aesthetics. Moreover,Dewey reminds us that art is not exclusive to art galleries, museums, or expensive collections but is born in our daily experiences. A brilliant work, written in an elegant, dynamic style!

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Jan 10, 2009 Monica rated it it was amazing

Another text that has changed my understanding about art and living. This text helped me to continue to emphasize the importance of the arts and the imagination in school. Dewey clearly demonstrates how art is a natural and important part of life.

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Mar 06, 2018 Angela rated it it was amazing

So, so so wonderful. This is a work of genius and beauty.

For me this book has to be read with a pencil. I appreciate it FAR more when I read a chapter in an evening and then write notes on it. There’s a lot to integrate, enjoy, and just appreciate on an aesthetic level.

Yeah, reading this is itself an aesthetic experience for me. Again and again, reading this book takes me into flights of sublimity - actual intellectual climaxes I’ve only experienced with a few speakers and writers in my life. I So, so so wonderful. This is a work of genius and beauty.

For me this book has to be read with a pencil. I appreciate it FAR more when I read a chapter in an evening and then write notes on it. There’s a lot to integrate, enjoy, and just appreciate on an aesthetic level.

Yeah, reading this is itself an aesthetic experience for me. Again and again, reading this book takes me into flights of sublimity - actual intellectual climaxes I’ve only experienced with a few speakers and writers in my life. It’s not like this is the most brilliant philosophy book ever written, but it is pretty damn brilliant - showing me that Pragmatism has a lot more to it than I credit it for because I tend to think American philosophers are brutish and lack cosmopolitan education. (Admittedly other Dewey books I've read bored me to tears....)

But this book strikes such chords of truth with me that it produces these actual peak moments of yes. I am SO happy reading it and long to share it with others who might share the joy of it. I think part of the resonance is because I read the book once 20 years ago and sort of understood it, and over the past two decades have experienced experience in a way that was only somewhat consciously shaped by this work. Additionally, my minimalist metaphysical/ epistemological position on the nature of reality and experience - which comes from a combination of yoga and pragmatism (pragmatism itself being a step ahead of phenomenology in some ways, as well as being deeply influenced by certain elements of Advaita Vedanta) resonates so strongly with what Dewey articulates here. So he’s just saying what I feel to be true, both in his joyful, holistic comments on the aesthetic AND in his critiques of dualistic, internally contradictory modes of thinking.

A lot of new “spiritual” teachings about spiritual bypassing and “deep materialism” are articulated here. More than a hundred years ago. And articulated far better than anywhere else I’ve seen in modern spiritual writings.

The poverty of lived experience - if it is not fully integrated with the senses and objects and the world - is a big theme for Dewey. Accordingly I fear that the capacity to enjoy this work - on a purely AESTHETIC level - will be lost. It presumes a level of concentration, and ability to become absorbed into a world of sheer abstraction. The payoff is really significant - kinds of aesthetic thrill that far surpass “entertainment” of any sort I know. But damn, it’s a big investment of time, background and concentration to be able to have this reading experience.

On that point, just for a taste of this nearly hundred-year-old prose, here’s a passage I used for a blog post a few months ago, something that highlights the poverty of lived experience at times, and is a very good example of Dewey putting the Radical Empiricist doctrines of William James into practice.

From page 45 - 47 in Chapter 3, Having an Experience:

"An experience has pattern and structure, because it is not just doing and undergoing in alternation , but consists of them in relationship. To put one’s hand in the fire that consumes it is not necessarily to have an experience. The action and its consequence must be joined in perception. This relationship is what gives meaning; to grasp it is the objective of all intelligence. The scope and content of the relations measure the significant content of an experience. A child’s experience may be intense, but, because of lack of background from past experience, relations between undergoing and doing are slightly grasped, and the experience does not have great depth or breadth. No one ever arrives at such maturity that he perceives all the connections that are involved. There was once written (by Mr. Hinton) a romance called “The Unlearner.” It portrayed the hole endless duration of life after death as a living over of ethics’s incidents that happened in a short life on earth, in continued discovery of the relationships involved among them.”

"… nothing takes root in the mind when there is no balance between doing and receiving. Some decisive action is needed in order to establish contact with ethical realities of the world and in order that impressions my be so related to facts that their value is tested and organized. Because perception of relationship between what is done and what is undergone constitutes the work of intelligence, and because the artist is controlled in the process of his work by his grasp of the connection between what he has already done and what he is to do next, the idea that the artist does not think is intently and penetratingly as a scientific inquirer is absurd…. Any idea that ignores the necessary role of intelligence in production of works of art is based upon identification of thinking with the use of one special kind of material, verbal signs and words. To think effectively in terms of relations of qualities is as severe a demand upon thought as to think in terms of symbols, verbal and mathematical. Indeed, since words are easily manipulated in mechanical ways, the production of a work of genuine art probably demands more intelligence than does most of the so-called thinking that goes on among those who pride themselves on being ‘intellectuals.'" ...more

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Apr 27, 2008 Bryan rated it it was amazing

Profound and sensible.

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Dec 08, 2008 eesenor rated it it was amazing

Dewey shows how Art is not a specialized realm, but is rather at play in all ordinary experience.

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Aug 29, 2010 Kym rated it it was ok

Ouch, this is a tough one. Some very memorable and useful pieces swimming in the sea of concepts. I've never felt so stupid reading a book in my life! ...more

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Jun 07, 2020 Zack rated it really liked it

The opening essay of this book is one of the most inspiring I've read in philosophy. After that, the book slows down a bit, very carefully and systematically working through issues and definitions in theories of aesthetics in a manner that is always fascinating and always relatable and even simple, but with a degree of depth that made careful engagement both a necessity and sometimes a bit of a chore. Each chapter is filled with intriguing examples and relatable analogies that make most of the c ...more

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Jul 24, 2018 Peaches rated it it was ok

So, I'm using this for my dissertation, which means 1. I'm not giving this book an in-depth review, as I'll be spending much time with it, and 2. It obviously wasn't too bad if I'm using it, but that doesn't mean it was enjoyable!
John Dewey is a fascinating educational figure that I did not learn about until my doctoral program, which is horrifying since I've been in education for years now and hold multiple degrees in it. He pioneered learner-center classrooms and utilizing the arts for learnin ...more

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Dec 02, 2020 Matthew rated it did not like it · review of another edition

I could barely follow what he was saying. While it may be a complicated topic, I feel the author was intentionally verbose and abstruse. I can't see why they couldn't have made the topic more intelligible. If I'd gone slowly and tried to work out the exact meaning of each sentence the book would probably have taken me more than a year to read.

By the end, I had no idea what he defines as an artistic experience. I began by thinking he meant it was the feeling experienced when observing a work of a ...more

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Nov 20, 2018 Jessica rated it it was amazing

I have read many books, treatises, and articles about the arts and aesthetics. As a musician and humanities teacher, however, many philosophic/aesthetic approaches have fallen short of my own personal experiences with performing, engaging in, and teaching the arts to students. Dewey has a wholistic approach that opens the door for many kinds of experiences and many types of art that are all valid and all deserve a place at the table. His definition of art and his wholistic, flexible approach mos ...more

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About John Dewey

John Dewey

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John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. Dewey, along with Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, is recognized as one of the founders of the philosophy of pragmatism and of functional psychology. He was a major representative of the progressive and progressive populist philosophies of schooli John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. Dewey, along with Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, is recognized as one of the founders of the philosophy of pragmatism and of functional psychology. He was a major representative of the progressive and progressive populist philosophies of schooling during the first half of the 20th century in the USA.

In 1859, educator and philosopher John Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont. He earned his doctorate at Johns Hopkins University in 1884. After teaching philosophy at the University of Michigan, he joined the University of Chicago as head of a department in philosophy, psychology and education, influenced by Darwin, Freud and a scientific outlook. He joined the faculty of Columbia University in 1904. Dewey's special concern was reform of education. He promoted learning by doing rather than learning by rote. Dewey conducted international research on education, winning many academic honors worldwide. Of more than 40 books, many of his most influential concerned education, including My Pedagogic Creed (1897), Democracy and Education (1902) and Experience and Education (1938). He was one of the founders of the philosophy of pragmatism. A humanitarian, he was a trustee of Jane Addams' Hull House, supported labor and racial equality, and was at one time active in campaigning for a third political party. He chaired a commission convened in Mexico City in 1937 inquiring into charges made against Leon Trotsky during the Moscow trials. Raised by an evangelical mother, Dewey had rejected faith by his 30s. Although he disavowed being a "militant" atheist, when his mother complained that he should be sending his children to Sunday school, he replied that he had gone to Sunday School enough to make up for any truancy by his children. As a pragmatist, he judged ideas by the results they produced. As a philosopher, he eschewed an allegiance to fixed and changeless dogma and superstition. He belonged to humanist societies, including the American Humanist Association. D. 1952. ...more

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“Like the soil, mind is fertilized while it lies fallow, until a new burst of bloom ensues.” — 23 likes

“Every art communicates because it expresses. It enables us to share vividly and deeply in meanings… For communication is not announcing things… Communication is the process of creating participation, of making common what had been isolated and singular… the conveyance of meaning gives body and definiteness to the experience of the one who utters as well as to that of those who listen.” — 11 likes

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