Experience & Nature Centennial

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Last Updated: Mar 26, 2025, 05:27 PM

Celebrating 100 Years of Experience & Nature

This year marks the centennial anniversary of the publication of John Dewey’s magisterial work, Experience and Nature. In advance of the upcoming 2025 conference, the Center for Dewey Studies has developed  a helpful reading guide for Experience and Nature aimed at new readers, including those who may be less familiar with Dewey's philosophy, as well as returning readers seeking deeper engagement with the book.

Globally, Dewey remains one of the most well-known American public intellectuals, influential not only in philosophy, but in many other areas, especially in the fields of education and democratic theory. In recent decades, Dewey’s significance within the field of philosophy has been reassessed, with several prominent mainstream philosophers urging the importance of his ideas. Our current context is an important moment for the study and application of Dewey's ideas. 

Experience and Nature is one of the most important of Dewey’s mature works, providing the definitive statement of Dewey’s “empirical naturalism” or “naturalistic empiricism.” Though long an object of study among Dewey scholars, its significance for contemporary philosophy is still under-appreciated. The book focuses on philosophical method, the metaphysics of nature, and the philosophy of mind; it also situates Dewey’s theories of knowledge, meaning, aesthetics, and value within this broader metaphysical naturalist picture. The book has much to offer contemporary discussions in metametaphysics, non-reductive naturalism, epistemology and philosophy of science, and embodied and sociocultural theories of mind and cognition. 

The Center for Dewey Studies will be hosting a conference celebrating this Centennial in October 2025. The goal of the conference is to bring together Dewey scholars, contemporary philosophers explicitly inspired by Dewey, and other philosophers working on topics relevant to the book. We will invite four keynote speakers that cover this range of approaches to explore the interpretation and contemporary relevance of Experience and Nature. This event will be the capstone on a year of efforts by the Center for Dewey Studies in celebration of the Centennial, including the free publication of a guide for reading groups and a series of video lectures on the book. 

Centennial Resources

The Center for Dewey Studies has prepared a number of resources and events in celebration of the Centennial.

  • Reading Guide

    For those looking for some help in getting started reading Experience and Nature, the Center for Dewey Studies has developed a Reading Guide to this major work of Dewey's for Centennial celebration. 

  • Ukrainian Translation

    Andrii Leonov, a graduate student in the Center for Dewey Studies, has translated the seventh chapter of Experience and Nature, "Nature, Life, and Body-Mind," into Ukrainian, published in the journal Actual Problems of Mind.

  • Centennial Conference

    The goal of the conference is to bring together Dewey scholars, contemporary scholars explicitly inspired by Dewey, and others working on topics relevant to Experience and Nature. We invite papers that explore the interpretation and contemporary relevance of Experience and Nature.

  • Get the Book

    We recommend using the edition of Experience and Nature found in The Later Works of John Dewey volume 1, part of the Critical Edition published by SIU Press. Subscribers to John Dewey Online can also find the book at Past Masters.

From the Archive: Carus Lecture Notes

For the Centennial, we are working to digitize documents related to Experience and Nature that are currently only available in the physical archives of the Special Collections at SIU. We start off with the Carus Lectures presented by Dewey in 1922. According to the textual commentary for the Later Works volume 1, "John Dewey was selected in 1922 by... the American Philosophical Association... to present the first series of lectures on the Paul Carus Foundation... The choice of Dewey to inaugurate such a prestigious series clearly certified him as America's preeminent philosopher." These lectures are of the utmost importance because they represent the earliest form of the Experience and Nature. The digitized documents are very rough notes in the John Dewey Papers, which may be a draft form of the final lectures. The extant notes seem to be somewhat incomplete.

Forthcoming: We plan to digitize Dewey’s original version of his famous "Unfinished Introduction" to Experience and Nature, which is well-known to scholars by Dewey's attempt to substitute the notion of "experience" with that of "culture." Dewey scholars will be able to see Dewey’s original intention behind his Re-Introduction before it was edited and shortened by Joseph Ratner.

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