Upcoming Conference

Learn more about the Experience and Nature Centennial celebrations

John Dewey's Experience & Nature: A Centennial Celebration

October 16-19, 2025 • Southern Illinois University, Carbondale

As 2025 marks the centennial of the publication of John Dewey’s monumental work, Experience and Nature, we are excited to announce a conference to celebrate this anniversary at the Center for Dewey Studies at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Dewey is one of the most well-known philosophers, educators, and public intellectuals in American history, and recognition of his significance is on the rise. Dewey’s Experience and Nature provides the definitive statement of Dewey’s “empirical naturalism” (or “naturalistic humanism”), a metaphysical approach that is pro-science without being overly scientistic, undermines centuries of philosophical question-begging, and offers an alternative to theories that set humans against nature, society, and, ultimately, themselves. The work focuses on philosophical method, the metaphysics of nature, and the philosophy of mind; it also situates Dewey’s theories of knowledge, meaning, art, and value within its naturalist-humanist metaphysics. Though long an object of study among Dewey scholars, the book’s significance for contemporary thought in a variety of fields remains underappreciated. Experience and Nature has much to offer contemporary discussions in philosophy, history, aesthetic theory, psychology, and anthropology. This conference will bring together Dewey scholars and other contemporary thinkers both inspired by Dewey and working on relevant topics in Dewey’s spirit.

Invited Speakers

• Roberta Dreon, Ca' Foscari University of Venice
• Steven Fesmire, Radford University
• Mark Johnson, University of Oregon
• Vincent Colapietro, University of Rhode Island
• Additional speakers TBA

Call for Proposals / Call for Abstracts

Potential Topics

The goal of the conference is to celebrate the centennial of John Dewey’s Experience and Nature. We seek to encourage new interpretations and assessments of the legacy of Dewey’s Experience and Nature that are balanced, historically responsible, relevant, constructive, and critical. In the spirit of Dewey’s own philosophy, we also intend this conference to be forward-looking, asking both what we can learn from Dewey’s own theoretical philosophy and what resources exist in it that can be useful to the problems in contemporary philosophy, humanities, and the sciences, as well as to look into its relevance for the problems of human life and culture. Topics and guiding questions for talks, posters, and panel discussions thus might include, but are not limited to:

• Philosophical method, especially pragmatist, naturalistic, empirical, and cultural.
• What is the relationship between the project of Experience and Nature and the parts of Dewey’s philosophy that is applied, practical, interdisciplinary, and public-facing?
• Naturalistic metaphysics, liberal versus reductive/scientistic naturalisms, naturalism and empiricism, cultural naturalism.
• Philosophy of mind, especially pragmatic approaches to the mind-body problem, embodied and sociocultural theories of mind, the evolution of mind.
• How can Dewey's views of mind and consciousness inform contemporary psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience, anthropology, and pedagogy?
• How can Dewey’s instrumental understanding of the human intellect, and his call for making social institutions more intelligent, inform the development and application of artificial intelligence and machine learning?
• Reassessing Dewey’s philosophy of meaning, language and communication in relation to experience, nature, and mind.
• Dewey’s account of cognition and science as a response to the complexity and precariousness of nature.
• How can Dewey's view of human embeddedness in nature affect our approaches to climate change, biodiversity, and animal rights?
• How should we rethink the relation of pragmatism to phenomenology in light of Experience and Nature?
• Naturalistic accounts of normativity, values, art, and criticism.
• How does Dewey’s critique of historically entrenched dualisms (e.g., mind/body, subject/object, fact/value, nature/nurture, individual/society) and his emphasis on pluralism support innovative research programs in cognitive science, biology, education, psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science, philosophy, etc.?
• With a century's worth of hindsight, what developments and changes did Dewey fail to anticipate, and how can his approach be updated for the twenty-first century?
• Dewey and history. What is the place of Dewey’s Experience and Nature in the history of ideas? How should we evaluate Dewey’s philosophical-historical narratives in E&N?
• What critical light can be shed on Dewey’s ideas by contemporary posthumanist, biocentrist, and ecological thought that might revise and further his naturalistic project?

Talks that specifically cite and discuss Dewey’s Experience and Nature are encouraged, but talks on such topics that are broadly Deweyan in spirit are also welcome.

Proposal Formats

• Traditional Talks. Proposals for traditional talks should include an abstract of up to 500 words, plus a bibliography of sources cited.
• Panel Discussions. Proposals for panel discussions should include a 500-word panel abstract describing the topic, as well as a 1–2-page description of the panel rationale, format, and the contribution of each panelist. Panels should not be loose collections of individual traditional talks; they should have a specific rationale for being presented together, with a format that matches the topic and rationale.
• Poster Presentations. The conference will include a reception and poster session where presenters will share their research with attendees as they walk around to view the posters and talk to the presenters. There are many useful guides for poster presentations for humanities and philosophy conferences online. Traditional talks which cannot find space on the main program will have the option to be considered for the poster session.