Thinking and Living “Experience”: Pragmatist Contributions from John Dewey
Résumé
John Dewey remains a renowned author for understanding and defining the notion of experience. This may be an initial motivation to read and reread his work and discover the extent of his contribution. Experience, in Dewey's work, is presented as a relationship‐building process with intensified relational effects. While Jean‐Pierre Cometti draws our attention to the centrality of the notion of experience in American philosophy (1999), he also studies how broad Dewey's philosophical project is and makes a decisive contribution to the structuring of the pragmatist current, which does not become a homogeneous current. He also allows us to understand the current state of John Dewey's social philosophy, particularly when he analyzes democracy as a “way of life” (1920) that constantly defines and redefines its own norms. Reading Dewey leads to a redefinition of politics as experimentation made possible by the active presence of the public.