ABSTRACT
Students who study John Dewey's work carefully usually agree that his contributions to educational thought are considerable; his work should not be ignored. Dewey used the dialectical method to clarify his thought and move on to a new level of planning and acting, but he did not claim that this new level was necessarily the final answer. Dewey studied and wrote in almost all the branches of philosophy: logic, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of science, ontology, aesthetics, political and social philosophy, and ethics. Although Dewey sounded like a behaviorist when he rejected transcendental and supernatural explanations, he was very clear in his opposition to stimulus-response psychology. This psychology claimed that all of human behavior can be explained in terms of conditioned responses to stimuli in the environment. In addition to his work on psychology and epistemology, Dewey also wrote extensively on social and political philosophy. Dewey's discussion of democracy starts with a naturalistic description of human beings as social animals.
