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He argued that philosophy should give up hunting for certain foundations beneath our beliefs, and instead treat truth as whatever survives an open, ongoing conversation among free people.
He argued that ideas are tools for solving real problems rather than mirrors of eternal truth, and spent a long public career trying to rebuild education and democracy on that basis.
Connection
John Dewey pragmatism without foundations Richard Rorty — Rorty explicitly named Dewey, alongside Wittgenstein and Heidegger, as one of the three philosophers whose work pointed beyond the search for secure epistemological foundations toward treating inquiry as an ongoing, self-correcting social practice.
Ideas
Words
“Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with saying.”
“The idea that one has had, or can have, a great vision has been replaced by the idea that the way to have the good, communal life is to abjure the very notion of having such a vision.”
“Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.”
“We do not learn from experience... we learn from reflecting on experience.”
Key Moments
1979
Publishes Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
1998
Publishes Achieving Our Country
1916
Publishes Democracy and Education
1937
Chairs the Dewey Commission
Works
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
Democracy and Education