Experience and Nature
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- No scanning noise detected (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand)
- Extent:
- ~160,000 words · 764 passages
Cite this work
- APAJohn Dewey. (n.d.). Experience and Nature. Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/john-dewey/experience-and-nature
- MLAJohn Dewey. Experience and Nature. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/john-dewey/experience-and-nature.
- ChicagoJohn Dewey. Experience and Nature. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/john-dewey/experience-and-nature.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
What it is about
Dewey's metaphysics, if it can be called that: what experience is once one stops thinking of it as something happening inside a head and sees it as a living being's dealings with its surroundings.
Context and history
Published in 1925. The thesis is that the separation of man from nature, of thinking from doing, of means from ends, is not a discovery but an inheritance from Greek philosophy that no longer serves. Years later Dewey wrote that had he been able to retitle it he would have called it 'Culture and Nature', because the word 'experience' dragged so much earlier philosophy behind it that it made him say the opposite of what he meant.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
.... tive products, the most authentic statements of commended methods of science, and work from them back to the primary facts of life. The two methods differ in starting point and direction, but not in objective or evenpetent knowledge, and those who start from the latter must somehow journey back to the homely facts of daily existence. existence. Each way of approach has its advantages and its dan¬ gers. Those who are able to pursue the road of that technical and refined knowledge called science are fortu¬ nate. Put the history of thought shows how easy it is for ' them to forget that science is after all an art, amatterjof *-perfected skill in conducting inqui£y; while it reveals that i those who are not directly engaged in the use of this art readily take science to be something finished, absolute in itself, instead of the result of a certain technique. Con¬ sequently “scientific” philosophies have over and over again made the science of their own day the premises of philosophy only to have them undermined by later science And even when reasonably sure foundations are provided by the science of a period, a philosopher has no guarantee save his own acumen and honesty that he will not em¬ ploy them in such a way as to get lost on a bypath. Professed scientific philosophers have been wont to employ the remoter and refinished products of science in ways which deny, discount or pervert the obvious and immediate factsof gross experience, unmindful that thereby philosophy itself commits suicide.