Volume 87, Issue 2, Spring 2013
John Dewey
Thomas M. Alexander
Pages 347-362
John Dewey’s Uncommon Faith
Understanding “Religious Experience”
Dewey’s A Common Faith has been variously interpreted, both in terms of its relation to Dewey’s corpus and internally in terms of its leading ideas. I argue for its crucial relevance in understanding Dewey and undertake an analysis of the key idea of “religious experience” as an “attitude of existence.” This distinguishes religious experience from other types of qualitative experience and shows the unique place this concept has for Dewey.