 To begin, why was experience such an important concept that it penetrated Dewey’s very approach to philosophy? Keep three influences in mind. First, recall that Dewey inherited from Darwin the idea of nature as a complex congeries of changing, transactional processes without fixed ends; in this context, experience means the undergoing and doing of organisms-in-environments, “a matter of functions and habits, of active adjustments and readjustments, of coordinations and activities, rather than of states of consciousness” (“A Short Catechism Concerning Truth”, MW6: 5).  Second, recall that Dewey took from James a radically empirical approach to philosophy—the insistence that perspectival experience, including that called personal, emotional, or temperamental, was philosophically relevant and worth factoring into abstract and logical theories. Finally, recall that Dewey accepted from Hegel experience as manifested in particular social, historical, and cultural modes. Not only is the self constituted through experiential transactions with the community, but this recognition vitiates the Cartesian model of the simple, atomic self and methods based upon that presumption. Philosophy may start where we start, personally — with complex, symbolic, and cultural forms—and then articulate further emergences from them.