He taught at Columbia University from 1904 to 1930 and was professor emeritus from 1930 to 1939. Dewey lectured in Japan and China from 1919 to 1921, and visited schools in the USSR in 1928. He wrote for the general public on social problems and critical issues confronting American industrial democracy. Like James, Dewey maintains that the mind is an instrument for realizing purposes. Ideas are teleological weapons of mind.
Ideas are plastic and adaptable.
They owe their stability to the vital functions which they serve. Dewey regarded philosophy as the criticism of those socially important beliefs which are part and parcel of the social and cultural life of human communities. This criticism involves an examination of the way in which ideas, taken as solutions of specific problems, function within a wider context. These are not to be derived from the assumption of an abstract truth, that is, a higher reality or a reality different from that within which we live and act, nor from everlasting values. But they become nonempirical because they fail to supply directions for experimentation.