This article focuses on the book "The Philosophy of John Dewey," selected and edited by Joseph Ratner. Philosophy has always vacillated between the task of understanding the complexity of the world, in all its brutal indifference to human aspirations, and the need to enunciate in a logical way the import of human dreams. In the intensity of their longing for the good, philosophers often thought they were analyzing the world before them, when they were in truth expressing their own desires. When their systems somehow failed to square up with the facts of experience, they hung to them by denying the validity of experience because of its alleged superficial and chaotic character. And since their dreams seemed to point the way toward the melioration of human conditions it was easy to think of them as noble, although for all their nobility they remained strangely ineffectual. On the other hand, thinkers who deemed the first necessary step toward melioration to be an actual understanding of the world, or who, perhaps indifferent altogether to melioration, desired only to slake their thirst for understanding, these were considered supine slaves to facts, when not dangerously immoral. The criticism which has been leveled against Dewey seems never to have considered the above truism, and for this reason it has radically misunderstood the aim of his philosophy.
