Types of Thinking

In 1919, John Dewey traveled to China at the invitation of educators and intellectuals who had followed his work closely, delivering an extended series of lectures that would prove to be among the most significant of his career, and the least known. Presented at the height of his intellectual powers, these lectures offered something rare: Dewey thinking publicly and systematically through the full range of philosophical problems that had occupied him for decades, including a candid critique of his own experimental philosophy alongside competing schools of thought. Available to English-language readers for the first time in this edition, the lectures were originally preserved in Chinese newspaper transcripts from the 1920s, carefully edited and translated by Professor Robert W. Clopton and Dr. Tsuin-Chen Ou. Their work recovers a critical piece of Dewey's intellectual development, the moment, scholars note, when his thinking first crystallized into genuinely systematic form. The volume also includes a survey of Greek philosophy from its pre-Socratic origins through Aristotle, representing Dewey's most comprehensive historical overview of the philosophical tradition. With a lucid introduction by Samuel Meyer, Types of Thinking is essential reading for anyone serious about Dewey's thought and twentieth-century American philosophy.