John Dewey Quotes on Mind
John Dewey’s Experience and Nature (1925), The Quest for Certainty (1929), and the early Studies in Logical Theory (1903) gave classical American pragmatism its most systematic philosophy of mind. The central commitment is that mind is not a substance or a faculty but a function — the qualitative mode of natural transactions through which an organism responds adaptively to its environment, with consciousness emerging in the moments at which habit confronts genuinely problematic situations whose resolution requires the active reorganization of experience. The framework, drawing on James, Hegel’s organic naturalism, and Darwin’s biological framework, founded American naturalist philosophy of mind and shaped the subsequent traditions of philosophical psychology, education theory, and democratic political philosophy through Mead, Sidney Hook, and the contemporary neopragmatist revival.
Quotes
-
Attributed to John Dewey:
“We do not learn from experience; we learn from reflecting on experience.”
-
Attributed to John Dewey:
“The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alteration of old beliefs.”
-
“Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.”
The Quest for Certainty (1929), Ch. XI -
Attributed to John Dewey:
“To be playful and serious at the same time is possible, and it defines the ideal mental condition.”
-
Attributed to John Dewey:
“Time and memory are true artists; they remould reality nearer to the heart's desire.”
-
“While they denounce as subversive anarchy signs of independent thought, of thinking for themselves on the part of others lest such thought disturb the conditions by which they profit, they think quite literally for themselves, that is of themselves.”
Human Nature and Conduct (1921) Part 1 Section IV.