discoveries that were now being made in the new field of child psychology. Also, schools were simply not attuned to the social changes taking place in the emergent democracy of postbellum America. He saw a need for an entirely new philosophy of education.
In 1894, after ten years at Michigan, Dewey was appointed to a professorship at the University of Chicago. This university had been founded just three years earlier with lavish funds provided by John D. Rockefeller. Its president, William Rainey Harper, was already establishing Chicago as one of the leading centres for research and advanced study in the country, and Dewey was appointed to head the newly created department of philosophy, psychology, and pedagogy – an assignment that could not have suited his skills better. (Ironically, Peirce had earlier been considered for the post, but his pragmatic ideas had been regarded as too unorthodox.) It was here that Dewey would thrive and make his name as an original pragmatic philosopher, psychologist, and educator.
Dewey’s experimental work now led him to a growing understanding of the all-pervasive effect of Darwin’s theory of evolution. The implications of Darwinism in psychology, philosophy, and even education became clear. Life appeared to evolve by means of a struggle in which the fittest survived, rather than by a process of dialectical unfolding. Yet for his first few years at Chicago Dewey still retained his belief in ‘experimental idealism’ – the intellectual balancing act that managed to reconcile his neo-Hegelian metaphysics with the material of his experimental work. But it was becoming clear to him that this increasingly schizophrenic position was untenable. The dualisms that Dewey had so longed to resolve were once again catching up with him.
Did Hegel’s dialectical process in fact mirror the rational workings of the real world? It all came down to logic. Hegel had believed that ‘our logical processes are simply the reading off or coming to consciousness of the inherrently rational structure already possessed by the universe in virtue of the presence within it of this pervasive and constitutive action of thought’. But this view of logic made no allowance for genuine scientific activity as pursued by scientists. There was no room for scepticism and questioning – doubt and experimental inquiry had no place in such an all-inclusive metaphysical scheme of things. Dewey came to realise that what was required was a logic where ‘all the distinctions and terms of thought – judgment, concept, inference, subject, predicate … etc. … shall be interpreted simply and entirely as distinctive functions or divisions of labour within the doubt-inquiry process’. The main object of logic should be to explain ‘the eternal nature of thought and its eternal validity in relation to an eternal reality’.
It was time to abandon the old unanswerable conundrums of classical philosophy. Is the world logical, or is this just our way of looking at the world? What is truth? Does our thought match reality? Such questions should simply be dismissed. We must forget the idea that there is such a thing as ‘thought in general’, which attempts to find the true picture of ‘reality in general’. Instead we should concentrate on the particular problem at hand. Thought is not general, it is specific. It deals with real problems which arise in our particular personal experience.
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