John Dewey

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John Dewey
(1859-1952)


John Dewey lived from 1859 to 1952, he was born and raised in Vermont. He graduated from the University of Vermont and received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University. He taught at the University of Chicago, ware his ideas of “Learning by doing” started to gather interest.
Dewey’s work can be loosely identified as “Pragmatic”, and was influenced by the likes of Peirce and James. Dewey called his form of pragmatism “Instrumentalism” witch was an attempt to deal with metaphysical and epistemological issues.
Dewey believed that all knowledge is “practical” and refuted that intuition is knowledge. He came to the conclusion that philosophy in all senses is impossible.
Dewey believed that eternal truth can not be attained through intelligence, but intelligence can effectively deal with pressing social and political problems when it is rightly understood and applied.
A main point of interest for Dewey was men and women’s practical problems, for this he used a form of social psychology, in witch he dealt with three main factors: Habit, Impulse, and Intelligence. Habit he points out is basically a “mechanism for dealing with recurrent classes of stimuli. He explains that their are two types of habit: intelligent and routine. So basically put a habit is a “function” between an organism and an environment in witch life is furthered and maintained. An impulse is the starting point from witch a habit is learned and or developed, in other words a habit is nothing more than a well developed impulse. Just as habit is to impulse, intelligence is to habit. In other words what Dewey calls intelligence is an extremely malleable, finely tuned habit witch functions to better the organisms relation to its environment. Basically intelligence is a habit that steps in when other more routine habits fail to perform. Because the environment is continually changing habits require adjustment and ...