Reading Dewey Through The Desilo Lens: Overcoming Dualism Without Recovering Wholeness
John Dewey is particularly interesting when read through the Desilo lens (Jaafar 2026) because his intellectual journey can be understood as a sustained struggle against dualism. Yet overcoming dualism is not necessarily the same as recovering wholeness. Dewey’s intellectual life presents precisely this tension. His early philosophical formation was strongly Hegelian. After studying at the University of Vermont, Dewey entered Johns Hopkins University, where George Sylvester Morris became an important influence upon him. From this Hegelian encounter Dewey developed a strong resistance to philosophical divisions and an attraction towards an organic conception of experience (Hildebrand, 2023). Mind and body, individual and society, and thought and action could not adequately be understood as completely isolated entities. But Hegelian unity came with something else: metaphysics and teleology. Hegel understood reality and history within a larger rational development rather than as an accid...