Abstract

Experience and Knowledge. "Experience" for Dewey is without doubt the most fundamental and pervasive concept of his philosophy. One may even characterize his entire philosophic endeavor as an attempt to reconstruct the philosophic use of "experience" in order to bring it into closer contact with the multifarious concrete experiences of men, and to escape the artificial and fruitless disputes of epistemologists. By analyzing five contrasts with what Dewey sometimes called "the traditional concept of experience," Professor Smith has conveyed succinctly what this reconstruction involves. Experience consists of transactions of organism-environment which are more inclusive than knowing situations; experience is not primarily subjective, subject and object are distinctions instituted within experience; experience is active and not restricted to the specious present, it involves projection into the future; it does not consist of an aggregate of independent and disconnected elements, it contains genuine connections within itself; and finally, experience is not opaque to reason, it can become funded with intelligence.