John Dewey formative note 1

 In 1875, at the university of Vermont, Dewey read physiology manual by Thomas Henry Huxley in a course by Prof. G. H. Perkins. It talked of Holism of human, non dualist view of human.

Then he received personal tutorial from Henry Augustus Pearson Tory, prof of moral philosophy and ethics.

After 2 years of teaching, enrolled into post graduate study in John Hopkins university in 1882.

Johns Hopkins University, founded in 1876, was the first American university based on the German research university model. It was within this intellectual environment that John Dewey developed his early philosophical thinking. He was mentored by George Sylvester Morris, a Hegelian philosopher who argued for a holistic conception of the human being, in which mind and body constituted a unified entity.

Another important character in this intellectual environment was G. Stanley Hall, a psychologist who insisted that the brain could be studied empirically. Dewey also encountered the thought of Charles Sanders Peirce, the originator of pragmatism. Dewey graduated in 1884 with a dissertation on Kant’s psychology.

He then took a teaching position at the University of Michigan. When Dewey arrived in Michigan, he carried with him the Hegelian philosophy he had inherited, particularly its emphasis on meaning, purpose, and the unity of human existence. One of his students there, Alice Chipman, submitted an interesting essay in which she questioned the insular nature of theory and philosophy when they failed to have an impact on the real lives of ordinary people, especially those hit hardest by life. Her challenge demanded that Dewey’s philosophical thinking touch base with reality. Dewey and Alice eventually married.

Another major influence came from William James. Dewey read James’s The Principles of Psychology, published in 1890, which approached the mind in terms of biological components rather than an idealist metaphysical structure. This became an important point in Dewey’s intellectual development. He began to abandon part of the Hegelian philosophy he had inherited, particularly its metaphysical and idealist conception of meaning and purpose. Yet he did not abandon Hegel altogether. He retained Hegel’s sense of unity, particularly the rejection of a strict separation between body and mind. What Dewey increasingly dismissed was the metaphysical aspect of Hegelian philosophy.

Then, in 1894, Dewey received an offer from the University of Chicago. Founded only in 1890 and headed by John Harper, the university was aggressively pinching scholars from elsewhere. It was an overblown research university with substantial financial resources.

At Chicago, Dewey was given the helm of the Department of Philosophy and Education. The very combination of philosophy and education was significant: it symbolised an amalgamation and unification of philosophical thought with educational practice. In this sense, even as Dewey was moving away from Hegelian metaphysics, the institutional arrangement reflected something he continued to carry from Hegel—the concept of unity. Philosophy was not to remain isolated as abstract thought but was to be brought together with education and, ultimately, with lived human experience.