Experience & Nature Reading Guide

As 2025 marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of John Dewey's Experience and Nature, the Center for Dewey Studies at Southern Illinois University Carbondale has developed this reader's guide to support engagement with the book. The purpose of this guide is to provide chapter-by-chapter resources for individuals and reading groups who want to read Experience and Nature for the first time, as well as for those who are already familiar with the book and wish to revisit it in order to gain a deeper understanding of it.

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 recommends learning from the sciences without falling into reductionism or scientism. Dewey's Experience and Nature attempts to overcome the tradition of philosophical theories that set humans against nature, society, and, ultimately, themselves. The work explores philosophical methods, the metaphysics of nature, and the philosophy of mind; it also situates Dewey's theories of knowledge, meaning, art, and value within a 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 under-appreciated. Experience and Nature has much to offer contemporary discussions in philosophy, history, literary and aesthetic theory, psychology, and anthropology. 

This guide is divided into 13 weeks, most of which are focused on single chapters of Experience and Nature. For each week, we recommend additional readings that provide further insight into the focal reading; a brief discussion of the background of and a summary of the chapter; a list of major concepts introduced in the chapter, which you might attempt to define; and a list of questions for discussion for groups or individual reflection, as a prompt to deeper engagement.