James Hayden Tufts

James Hayden Tufts (1862– August 5, 1942), an influential American philosopher, was a professor of the then newly founded Chicago University. Tufts was also a member of the Board of Arbitration, and the chairman of a committee of the social agencies of Chicago. The work Ethics in 1908 (with a second edition appearing in 1932) was a collaboration of Tufts and John Dewey. Tufts believed in a conception of mutual influences which he saw as opposed in both Marxism and idealism.

Tufts was born in Monson Massachusetts and attended his father's school. He was an 1884 graduate of Amherst College; received a B.D. from Yale University in 1889 (where he won the John Addison Porter Prize), an M.A. from Amherst College in 1890, and his Ph.D. from the University of Freiburg under Alois Riehl in 1892. With John Dewey and George Herbert Mead (both of whom Tufts was instrumental in bringing to the University), Tufts was a co-founder of the Chicago School of Pragmatism. Tufts was a longstanding chairman of the Department of Philosophy and at one time was the acting president of Chicago University.

Tufts sat on the editorial committee of The American Journal of Theology in 1918, 1919, and 1920. He edited the journal Ethics from October 1914 through 1931.