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In this volume Professor Dewey has brought together a number of essays and addresses belonging to recent years. All of the papers except one, "A Short Catechism Concerning Truth," have been previously published, although in some of them certain minor changes have been made. The hitherto unpublished paper, which has the form of a dialogue between a teacher and pupil, is a defense of pragmatism against certain popular criticisms and misunderstandings. The other essays have the following titles: "The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy"; "Nature and Good: A Conversation"; "Intelligence and Morals"; "The Experimental Theory of Morals"; "The Intellectualist Criterion for Truth"; "Beliefs and Existences"; "Experience and Objective Idealism"; "The Postulates of Immediate Empiricism"; "Consciousness and Experience"; "The Significance of the Problem of Knowledge."

The fundamental idea underlying all of these essays is the necessity of a new formulation of philosophical problems and a radical transformation of philosophical ideas in the light of the new methods and problems that are now dominant in other fields of human inquiry. "Classic philosophies have to be revised because they must be squared up with the many social and intellectual tendencies that have revealed themselves since those philosophies matured. The conquest of the sciences by the experimental method of inquiry; the injection of evolutionary ideas into the study of life and society; the application of the historic method to religions and morals as well as to institutions; the creation of the sciences of 'origins' and of the cultural development of mankind—how can such intellectual changes occur and leave philosophy what it was and where it was? Nor can philosophy remain an indifferent spectator of the rise of what may be termed the new individualism in art and letters, with its naturalistic method applied in a religious, almost mystic spirit to what is primitive, obscure, varied, inchoate and growing in nature and human character" (p. v). The full realization of the changed intellectual conditions, Professor Dewey believes, will lead to the abandonment on the part of philosophy 'of the old metaphysical and epistemological problems,—the inquiries regarding the nature of the universe as a whole or of the universal conditions of experience,—and to the acceptance of the less pretentious, but more responsible, task of discovering the meaning of concrete situations as they arise in social and political life, and the practical methods of transforming them. "Philosophy forswears inquiry after absolute origins and absolute finalities in order to explore specific values and the specific conditions that generate them" (p. 13). "But if insight into specific conditions of value and into specific consequences of ideas is