Born 1859, John Dewey is regarded as one of the founders of pragmatic philosophy and as the father of Functional Psychology. Dewey's view of functional psychology very much resembles a Gestalt approach, he argues that the distinction between stimulus and response, and the arc between them is a purely fictitious one. A response cannot exist without a stimulus, and vice-versa, and it is pointless to look at the stimulus or response without the arc joining them. Thus the best approach is to view the entire stimulus response arc as one adaptive whole. Dewey argued that this same approach should be taken to all mental processes. Dewey's use of the term adaptive illustrates a huge influence by Darwinian Evolutionary Theory.
Dewey also had a profound influence on the psychology of learning, his theory of learning by doing was highly influential and is still something which is investigated and employed today. In fact, a great majority of psychology today is focused on learning and adaption, this could well be in part due to the work of Dewey along side such influences as Darwin.
The following is a link to John Dewy's text The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology. In this text, Dewey describes what he finds to be the universal element to all behavior and cognition, namely the reflex arc.
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