John Dewey (1859-1952) was born in Burlington, Vermont, the son of a grocer. At his mother's urging and apparently against his wishes, he entered the University of Vermont. He had little interest in intellectual pursuits, viewing them as unnecessary abstractions from the practical concerns of reality, until his senior year, when he took some philosophy courses. Impressed both by the "Scottish empirical realism" and "German rational idealism," especially Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, he also studied the evolutionary views of T.H. Huxley. After graduation, he taught high school for two years in Pennsylvania but then decided to go to graduate school in philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. In only two years he received his doctoral degree for his dissertation, "The Psychology of Kant." Six years later he published a little known but seminal work on the philosophy of Leibniz, Leibniz's New Essays Concerning Human Understanding: A Critical Exposition (1888)...

bio by Daniel Kolak in Lovers of Wisdom
(Wadsworth, 1997)