Abstract

This chapter situates John Dewey’s type of religious naturalism within the course of nineteenth-century philosophy of religion. His intellectual genealogy from Herder and Schelling through Goethe, Coleridge, and Trendelenburg infused his university years by way of the idealisms of James Marsh and George Morris. The ample continuities between his early ethical idealism and his late naturalistic humanism were central to his entire philosophy. Dewey’s shocking 1934 announcement in A Common Faith that naturalism can accommodate a God was no surprise to himself.