John Dewey's Objective Semiotics: Existence, Significance, and Intelligence

There is an abundance of scholarship on John Dewey. Dewey's writings are vast, so scholars try to find the crux that connects their many themes into a distinctive vision for philosophy and life. Many claim that the democratic way of life is the center of Dewey's philosophical vision.¹ Others claim that Dewey's response to Darwin was the impetus for a philosophical experimentalism that could envision a better life by responding to the needs in an age of modern industry.² Some claim that the crux is a dynamic and non-mechanistic naturalism that Dewey develops to critically undo the dualisms of tradition, most especially the distinction between nature and culture.³ There has even been an effort to interpret each of these themes within Dewey's theory about the conditions for aesthetics in life, the life of art within an experience, and an experience of life as art.⁴ Arguably, no...