Becoming John Dewey: Dilemmas of a Philosopher and Naturalist. By Thomas C. Dalton. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. xiv, 377 pp. $45.00, isbn 0-253-34082-9.)

Abstract

If Alexis de Tocqueville was right in saying that Americans have not been an especially philosophical people, they have nevertheless had their philosophers. Clearly, John Dewey is considered one of America's most important philosophers. Dewey lived more than nine decades, contributing to education, to philosophy, in particular, to pragmatism, and to liberal social thought, especially in the interwar years. Over the years many of Dewey's students and associates have offered us their interpretations of him. More recently, several professional historians have weighed in with serious scholarly contributions, especially Robert Westbrook and Alan Ryan, whose biographies have provided sorely needed historical information and perspective. And recent work in the history of education suggests that Dewey's career in education was short-lived and not particularly influential. That leaves us with Dewey as philosopher. Thomas C. Dalton presents what he believes is a fresh view of Dewey as a philosopher and social thinker with strong ties to psychology and the sciences; Dewey subsumed culture under nature as the product of natural forces, not as a countervailing force to natural processes and structures after the fashion of the “dual synthesis” social scientists and evolutionary theorists of the interwar era. Dalton claims that he is presenting a whole intellectual biography that includes all the people and experiences that truly influenced Dewey's thinking instead of a mere parade of books that Dewey published. Thus we learn about the influences of the ideas of evolutionary scientists, European and American philosophers, numerous figures from such fields as physics, anatomy, psychology, psychoanalysis, and art (especially Henri Matisse), and finally psychologists concerned with maturation and the development of the mind. All of this is rather hit-or-miss; some of the analyses are reasonably cogent and competent while others are disappointing or even wrong-headed. And there are some startling errors, such as the misspelled “Herman von Hemholtz” (instead of Hermann von Helmholtz, pp. 54–55, 57, 65, 69, and the index), not to mention an unrecognizable “Franz Boaz” (instead of Franz Boas, pp. 68, 97, 101, and the index).