In Instrumental Indians, Matthew Villeneuve explores how John Dewey, the nation’s most prominent philosopher of democracy and education, articulated his ideas in part by invoking imaginary Indians while utterly failing to account for his Indigenous contemporaries’ struggles to achieve self-determination in schools.

This collective study of the James siblings—Alice, William, and Henry—lights up their shared intellectual project: showing how minds meet in a world teeming with possibilities and risks. Philosophical Siblings offers a fresh way of thinking about literary encounters, one that approaches even the most iconic texts with serious lightness.