The Two-and-a-Half Years that Dewey lived in Japan and China offered him an East-West comparative standpoint to examine Euro-American presuppositions. In subsequent work, he took steps in the direction of a global philosophical outlook by promoting a fusion of aesthetic refinements with democratic experimentalism. The year 2021 marks the centennial of Dewey's return to the United States, yet philosophers in this country have only begun to take in an emerging global philosophical scene that includes unfamiliar questions, angles, idioms, and emphases. This includes American pragmatists. In a sense, as Gregory Pappas has observed in the context of Latin American philosophies, pragmatism did not “grow up” in the United States. As a coherent philosophy, it originated there, and it is now growing up through critical and mutually transformative intracultural dialogue (Pappas; cf. Behuniak).
As pragmatism continues to grow up, we can bear Thoreau's words in mind: “I know...
