Challenge

This readiness to use the language of traditional Christianity helped Dewey to communicate with a public that would have turned away from a more aggressively secular or skeptical writer. .......İt was even more surprising that Dewey could so successfully use the language of religious belief in the process of arguing for a view of the world that is commonly thought to be squarely at odds with religion. Dewey called his mature philosophy experimentalism, he preferred experimentalism to pragmatism and instrumentalism as labels for his approach. What he meant was that the truth, or more broadly the value, of any belief or statement about the world is to be measured in experience. He was insistent that a thoroughgoing naturalism was the only intellectually respectanble philosophy, the only approach to life, education, ethics, and politics that offered a shape of progress..........A lesser man than Dewey would have been challenged much more sharply about the conflict between his emphasis on the religious and his emphasis on science. Dewey's critics often wished that he would make himself clearer, but they always thought he had something important and coherent to say.

Dewey's main intellectual concept was that of a problem. İndividuals and societies alike are stirred into life by problems; an unproblematic world would be a world not so much at rest as unconscious. Such a world is unimaginable. Life is problematic, even when we are not thinking about our situation, our bodies are continuously solving endless problems of their own sustained existencse. Problem solving is the condition of organic life. Societies, like individuals solve problems and like individuals must do so by acting on the environment that causes the problem in the first place.

Ryan, A.; John Dewey; Norton & Company, 1995