Experience and Nature

Dewey's most systematic work of philosophy, developed from his Paul Carus Lectures and revised in 1929 with a new first chapter. It sets out what he called empirical naturalism: human experience is not a veil between us and nature but one of the ways nature itself goes on. Dewey proposes a "denotative method" that starts from experience as it is actually lived, and he accuses earlier philosophy of a recurring error, the "philosophic fallacy", of treating the results of inquiry as if they existed before it. He describes existence as a mix of the precarious and the stable, so that thought arises where things are uncertain. Later chapters argue that mind and meaning grow out of communication, that consciousness is a phase of activity rather than a separate substance, and that art is experience at its most complete. The final chapter presents philosophy as the criticism of values.

It is the fullest version of Dewey's naturalism, and it gives a reader a way of thinking about mind, meaning and value that does without the old splits between subject and object.