Abstract

The story of John Dewey's philosophical travels from Hegelianism to instrumentalism during the period from 1882 to 1896 has become codified into a fairly rigid and schematic explanation which appears nearly uniformly across literature on Dewey. Despite warnings from a few perceptive scholars who have suggested that we really do not have a firm grasp of Dewey's relationships with his early major influences, little close study has ever been made of the early years of his philosophical career. This would be irrelevant if the codified explanation were adequate, but in many central ways it is instead incorrect and deficient. ;This dissertation argues for five points to correct these problems. First, while clearly idealistic, Dewey's early philosophy shared little with the neo-Hegelian T. H. Green's philosophy and even less with Hegel's, because of its absorption of the little-understood Aristotelian organicism of George Morris. Second, the influence of Wilhelm Wundt's philosophy and psychology on Dewey was far greater than that mentioned by the standard story; recent original research on Wundt makes it now possible to reveal the actual nature of his contribution to Dewey's thought. Third, due to this influence and that of Morris, Dewey upheld the indissoluble integration of cognitive and volitional processes independently of James's and Peirce's efforts in that direction. Fourth, Dewey's revolutionary "The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology" in 1896 was the expression of his commitment to such an integration, and was not due to the influence of James. Fifth, and this is the most controversial claim, Dewey did not completely abandon his kind of idealism in order to complete his transition to instrumentalism in the 1890's. Rather, the foundations of instrumentalism made an early appearance in Dewey's idealist philosophy, and instrumentalism itself remained enfolded in an idealism which held that experience and reality are identical