Dewey and Environmental Philosophy

Though environmental philosophers trace the roots of environmental awareness to the decades of John Dewey’s prominence, Dewey himself was conspicuously mum about the environmental controversies of his day. A Deweyan environmental pragmatism, then, must find sustenance in less prosaically environmental themes of the American philosopher’s project. This chapter attends to Dewey’s notion of organism-environment interaction, which is at the core of Dewey’s understanding of experience and which informs Dewey’s philosophy from epistemology to aesthetics. The chapter stresses that Dewey’s notion of organism-environment interaction is an account of how organisms dynamically respond to changes in their environment. However, contrary to several misinterpretations of environmental pragmatism, this dynamic responsiveness is not a call for human control over nature. Indeed, we conclude that an environmental philosophy oriented by Dewey’s notion of organism-environment interaction provides promising approaches to interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity, and environmental justice.