John Dewey was a college professor, teaching for ten years at the University of Michigan, ten at the University of Chicago, and twenty-six at Columbia University, in New York. He was also something of an organizer within the academic world, serving as president of the American Philosophical Association 1905-06, and soon thereafter helping to found the American Association of University Professors, of which he became the first president in 1915.

As a philosopher, one of Dewey's key conceptions was dualism. His texts consist largely of the hunt for and the demolition of dichotomies, such as the ancient dichotomy between fixed realities and transient illusions.

In a 1919 essay, Dewey wrote that Plato and Aristotle came to believe in "a higher realm of fixed reality of which alone true science is possible and an inferior world of changing things with which experience and practical matters are concerned" because they were frightened by the dangers of the world, and they hoped to escape from those dangers into an impregnable fortress of the mind. He called that essay "Escape from Peril." His own ideal, then, was the contrary one of a naturalistic philosophy (even, one might say, monistically so) that would face peril and persevere in its midst.

If philosophy must work among perils, then theory can't be severed from practice, and ideas however exalted their claims are but instruments for the organisms that live in this transient world --hence, "instrumentalism," as Dewey baptized his version of pragmatism.

Mead studied at Harvard University, as well as the Universities of Leipzig and Berlin. While at Harvard, although he was never a student of William James, he did live in James' home as tutor to his children. It was at Leipzig that he became strongly interested in Darwinism, and his later development of pragmatism was to have a biological flavor.

Mead taught at Michigan, 1891-94, and at Chicago, from 1894 until his death in 1931. He never published a book, but four books appeared in his name after his death, edited by his students from stenographic records of his social psychology course at the University of Chicago and from numerous unpublished papers. Those four books are: The Philosophy of the Present (1932), edited by Arthur E. Murphy; Mind, Self, and Society (1934), edited by Charles W. Morris; Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century (1936), edited by Merritt H. Moore; and The Philosophy of the Act (1938), Mead's Carus Lectures of 1930, edited by Charles W. Morris.

Mead devoted much of his thought to a theory of communication, i.e. a theory of how "significant symbols" arise from mere gestures. One of his illustrations involved two dogs, circling each other and growling in a hostile manner. Each is gesturing, there is even a "conversation of gestures," but this is not yet language, because the dogs do not know that they are communicating. There is a continuum of possibilities from this encounter to the most complicated and subtle human exchanges.