Investigation and Review of John Dewey’s View on Generalities

The discussion on the nature of universal conceptions is one of the most important and most challenging issues in the history of philosophical thought. Some philosophers, including Plato and Aristotle, believed that universal concepts have external instances, and some would deny this. Most empiricists have denied the external instances of universal concepts. John Dewey was an empiricist philosopher who believed, unlike most of them, that universal truths have instances in the external world. He would wish to preserve his empiricist foundations to find objective instances for universal concepts. ―Method‖ was what helped him to achieve his goal. He claimed that ‗method‘, while being an objective and general idea, is the external instance for universal truths. The subject of this article is to explain, analyze and review that hypothesis. The investigations showed that his empiricist explanation of universals is not persuasive, and that ‗method‘ cannot resolve the problem thereof. Accordingly, he would have to choose between empiricism and accepting universal concepts