By Jeff Kasser

While there are many philosophers in America today, there are very few American philosophers. The distinctively American tradition in philosophy culminated in the work of John Dewey. But Dewey's Americanness has occasioned as much trivialization and misunderstanding as illumination.

When Bertrand Russell suggested that Dewey's work reflected the American glorification of action and commerce, Dewey replied that Russell's comment was no better than reducing German idealism to "a manifestation of an ability to elevate beer and sausage into a higher synthesis with the spiritual values of Beethoven and Wagner."

Dewey's pragmatism does not glorify the expedient at the expense of the theoretical. It is instead a sustained attempt to think through the consequences of a distinctively American willingness to endure, and even enjoy, a kind of intellectual insecurity.

European philosophers, Dewey complained, tried to think their way to an unattainable and unnecessary stability. In retrospect, we can see Dewey's enthusiasm for a philosophy of the mutable and the messy begin to emerge during his years at Michigan.