Experience and Nature
by John Dewey
Assigned by 1 of the 9 reading lists, catalogue entry only
- Written
- 1925
- Form
- Treatise
- Language
- English
- Length
- Long · 440 pp300 to 700 pages
- Difficulty
- Formidable5 of 5 for a first-year reader
We recommendExperience and NatureDover, 1958The 1929 second edition text, with the rewritten first chapter Dewey preferred.
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Dewey's most ambitious and most difficult book, the Carus Lectures expanded. He argues that philosophy has gone wrong by treating the objects of refined reflection as more real than the ordinary experience they came from, and proposes instead an empirical method that always traces ideas back to the situations that produced them. Nature is precarious and stable at once; mind, meaning and language emerge from organisms interacting with it; ends and values are things that arise within nature rather than above it. The last chapters treat existence as art and the place of criticism.
No reading guide yet
The catalogue entry above is complete: the dates, the form, the themes and every program that assigns Experience and Nature are verified against each program's published list.
What is missing is the part that takes real work: the summary, the key passages, and a recommended translation. The edition named below is the one most programs assign, so the buy links are useful already.
