Abstract

A collection of all of Dewey’s writings_ _for 1920_ _with the excep­tion of _Letters from China and Japan. A Modern Language Association Committee on Scholarly Editions textual edition._ The nineteen items collected here, including his major work, _Reconstruction in Philosophy, _evolved in the main from Dewey’s travel, touring, lecturing, and teaching in Japan and China. Ralph Ross notes in his Introduction to this volume that _Recon­struction in Philosophy _is_ _“a radical book... a pugnacious book by a gentle man.” It is in this book that Dewey summarizes his version of pragmatism, then called Instrumentalism. For Dew­ey, the pragmatist, it was people acting on the strength of in­telligence modeled on science who could find true ideas, ones “we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify.” Optimism pervades _Reconstruction of Philosophy_;_ _in keeping with Dewey’s world of open possibilities, the book recognizes that the obser­vation and thought of human striving can make the difference between despair and affirmation of life. The seven essays on Chinese politics and social tradition that Dewey sent back from the Orient exhibit both the liveliness and the sensitive power of an insightful mind. Set against a backdrop of Japanese hegemony in China, the last days of Manchu imperi­alism, Europe’s carving of China into concessions, and China’s subsequent refusal to accept the terms of the Treaty of Ver­sailles, the essays were startlingly relevant in this time of Eastern turbulence and change. At the National University of Peking, Dewey delivered a se­ries of lectures on “Three Contemporary Philosophers: William James, Henri Bergson, and Bertrand Russell.” The James and Bergson lectures are published for the first time in this volume. Dewey chose these philosophers, according to Ralph Ross, be­cause he was trying to show “his oriental audience what he believed and hoped about man and society and was talking about those fellow philosophers who shared the same beliefs and hopes.”