Develops a theory of culture based on a metaphysics that elaborates on the Platonic and Confucian traditions. In Metaphysics of Goodness, Robert Cummings Neville extends Alfred North Whitehead’s project of cultural studies, which was based on a new metaphysics that Whitehead developed in Adventures of Ideas. Neville’s focus is value or goodness in many modes. The metaphysics treated in this book derive from the Platonic and Confucian traditions, with significant modifications of Whitehead, Peirce, Dewey, Confucius, Xunzi, and Zhou Dunyi. Part (...) one develops a theory of form based on a metaphysics of harmony. Part two elaborates a theory of art based on a metaphysics of beauty. Part three sketches a theory of personhood based on a metaphysics of obligation. Part four discusses civilization in a systematic way based on a metaphysics of flourishing. Throughout the book, Neville elaborates a theory of interpretation that is inspired by Peirce, Dewey, and Xunzi but is not limited to their ideas. While the reasoning of the book is concise, it employs methodologies from many kinds of philosophy, art criticism, ethics, and cultural studies, and sees philosophy as needing to learn from all these disciplines. “Neville’s work is informed by a lifelong engagement with the most important philosophers in history, including Plato, Aristotle, Whitehead, and Dewey. Here, he offers an important argument that there is beauty not only in how people see the world, but also in the world itself.” — Kevin Schilbrack, Appalachian State University. (shrink)

This is a philosophic study of theory and practical reason focusing on social obligation and personal responsibility. It draws on Chinese as well as Western Traditions of philosophy.

The author constructs a philosophy of nature dealing with being, identity, value, space, time, motion, and causality, and uses that as a basis for a theory of hermeneutics to address contemporary problems of interpretation.

From the standpoint that both modernism and postmodernism look like nothing more than two late modern movements, too preoccupied with themselves and their historical place to engage a swiftly changing world containing more than the Western ...

The Renaissance development of science fulfilled the ancient ideal of integrating quantitative and qualitative thinking, but failed to recognize valuational thinking and thus deprived moral, aesthetic, and political thought of cognitive status. The task of this book is to reconstruct the concept of thinking in order to exhibit valuation, not reason, as the foundation for thinking and to integrate valuational with quantitative and qualitative modes. Part I explains the broad thesis, interpreting the problem of the foundations for thinking and providing (...) a general theory of value. Part II explains the role of valuation at the imaginative level of thinking with discussions of synthesis, perception, form, and art. The method of reconstruction requires a cosmology that is generated in successive waves. (shrink)

The book shows the connections between the personal and the social dimensions of freedom, and how all the meanings of freedom are functions of the natural cosmos.

Building on his long-standing work in metaphysics and Asian philosophy, Robert Cummings Neville presents a series of essays that cumulatively articulate a contemporary, progressive Confucian position as a global philosophy. Through analysis of the metaphysical and moral traditions of Confucianism, Neville brings these traditions into the twenty-first century. According to Confucianism, rituals define most of our relations with other individuals, social institutions, and nature, and while rituals make possible the positive institutions of high human civilization, they may also lead to (...) harmful behaviors, including racism, xenophobia, and sexism. Neville argues that the amendment of rituals that institutionalize oppression is a positive task, which should be undertaken from within a skillfully ritualized life rather than in the form of external criticism. Confucianism, in Neville's hands, is a left-wing, progressive, liberal political philosophy, one that can address institutionalized oppression and suggest a path for moving forward. (shrink)

In the 1978 volume of Process Studies, Nancy Frankenberry published an article called “The Empirical Dimension of Religious Experience” that I thought was so good that I wrote her a short fan letter about it.1 She responded by saying that she was flattered by my praise because I was a model for her younger generation. For the first time in my life I felt old. And I wasn’t yet forty. But here I am, still fully employed, presenting a long fan (...) letter at her retirement. Nice irony! I want to begin laying out some of the themes and accomplishments of her distinguished career as a model philosopher of religion by discussing her early book Religion and Radical Empiricism.2 The context in which she wrote.. (shrink)

Explores the human condition in a range of world religions and discusses the issue and philosophical implications of comparison itself.

This paper identifies five dimensions of cosmopolitanism, though doubtless there are many more: cosmopolitanism in decision making, engaging others, attaining personal wholeness, the ultimate value-identity of life, and religious sensibility. These are discussed in terms of the Confucian ideas of the “Four Beginnings,” ritual, life as cultivated education, sagehood, public versus private life, Principle, heart-mind, harmony, value, humaneness, “love with differences,” “roots and branches,” and filiality, among others. In all, it presents Confucianism as a living tradition that is facing up (...) to how it might extend itself in light of the need for cosmopolitanism. (shrink)

Religion is the third and final volume in Robert Cummings Neville's systematic development of a new philosophical theology. Unfolding through his earlier volumes, Ultimates and Existence, and now in Religion, philosophical theology considers first-order questions generally treated by religious traditions through philosophical methods while reflecting Neville's long engagement with philosophy, theology, and Eastern and Western religious traditions. In this capstone to the trilogy, Neville provides a theory of religion and presents a sacred worldview to guide religious participation. His philosophical theory (...) of value enlightens religions' approaches to ethics, spirituality, and religious institutional living and collaboration. With a detailed examination of plausibility conditions for sacred worldviews, the book concludes with an exploration of "religionless religion" for which institutions of religion are of penultimate value. Through the development of philosophical theology, Neville has built a unique, multidisciplinary, comparative, nonconfessional theological system, one that addresses concerns and provides tools for scientific and humanistic scholars of religion, postmodern thinkers, intellectuals from both secular and religious backgrounds, and those interested in the global state of religion today. (shrink)

Fifteen years after the publication of my assessment of comparative philosophy in the inaugural issue of Dao, this article comments on some of the major changes that have taken place in the field since Dao began. One of the most significant is the improvement in the conditions for Chinese philosophy in mainland China and the return of many of the original participants in Dao’s audience to positions in East Asia from earlier careers in the West. The article also surveys advances (...) in various forms of objective and normative comparison and in the development of metaphysics based on Chinese models. (shrink)

The general thesis of this article is that contemporary Chinese philosophy needs to be more creative than it is.1 It proposes eight new projects for Chinese philosophy to undertake that involve creativity. But first it asks what the term "Chinese philosophy" means in the current philosophical context.To some people, it means the tradition of philosophy in China from the ancient world of the Zhou texts, the Confucians, Daoists, and other schools, through its development up to the point where Western intellectual (...) influences became prominent in the nineteenth century.2 An appendix to this conception is the attempt to recover the vitality of the historical Chinese schools after the onslaught of Western thought (and .. (shrink)

This book develops a contemporary metaphysics of morals.

Let me begin by giving preliminary definition to the two kinds of contingency named in my title, although I shall argue that the distinction between them gets too complicated to sustain in the long run. Cosmological contingency is the contingency of things within the world upon other things within the world, plus perhaps their own spontaneous creativity. Ontological contingency is the contingency of everything in the world that is determinate in any way upon an ontological ground. That ontological ground cannot (...) itself be determinate, and you can recollect Plotinus's One, Thomas Aquinas's Pure Act of To Be, Brahman without qualities, or the Ultimate of Non-Being in Zhou Dunyi's philosophy for sample conceptions of... (shrink)

"Racism and Anti-Blackness" in America is very bad.1 What has pragmatism had to say about this? Charles S. Peirce was a racist and thought that blacks are inferior.2 Much as most readers of this journal love him for other things, Peirce's pragmatism needs to change in this regard insofar as it bears on his racist views. A significant part of Peirce's racism came from his appreciation of science. Louis Agassiz strongly opposed Darwinian evolution and upheld racist views regarding Africans; he (...) was a close friend of Peirce's father, Benjamin Peirce, who long defended Agassiz. After the Civil War, many scientists added Mexicans and Native Americans to the list of inferior peoples who needed to be controlled by the... (shrink)

The philosophy of John Smith is not a dispassionate subject for me. He was my teacher from my sophomore year in college through the PhD, which he mentored. I worked in his office nearly every day during that time. He became my intellectual father and framed the way I took up philosophy. He performed my wedding and twenty-five years later taught my two daughters. We worked together philosophically and in the politics of the academy from my first day as his (...) undergraduate typist, when I was utterly naïve about both topics, until the day he died, when I had no innocence left. His daughter Diana informed me of his death by responding to an e-mail I had sent him that afternoon. I preached his funeral, threw frozen dirt .. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Where Philosophy Has ArrivedRobert Cummings Neville (bio)The title here is ambiguous. It might mean where philosophy has arrived at this point. Or it might mean where philosophy has arrived and is passing through this point. I mean the second, where philosophy is passing through. The title is also ambiguous with regard to whose philosophy is under discussion. Wesley J. Wildman's is the topic I was invited to address, but (...) I would not take the time to write this if I were not to talk about my philosophy too. So, this philosophy is my philosophy addressing his philosophy, relative to a much larger whole.The first topic here is our general agreement that our feelings of the world are genuine feelings of the world in certain respects, not feelings of our consciousness, or anything like that. Wildman and I are pretty much in agreement here with the possible exception of his agreement, or disagreement, with my claim that value is exclusively laid on interpretations that come from the world. We share this ambiguity of agreement with regard to interpretation, which explains how we think that all lines of interpretation come from the world even when some lines of interpretation are in fact located with the body and brain we would adopt.Value is subject to my metaphysical theory in ways it is not for Wildman. I argue that value has a place in any determinate thing. It is part of the form of a determinate thing. This entails, of course, that every determinate things has value by virtue of having form. Values have hierarchical forms, with higher levels incorporating components through varieties of changes. The components of any determination are of two sorts, essential and conditional. The essential components give the determinate thing its own being, and the conditional components relate it to other determinate things. Thus every determinate thing is related to some other determinate things, and the whole of determinate things are all related directly or indirectly, with much difference constituted by time. Does Wildman have a metaphysical theory of time?Whether or not he does, we both have theories of how things are experienced by human beings. My theory says that distant things are experienced through lines of interpretation connecting those things with us where the connections end in the organs of human perception. Sights, sounds, touches, and kinesthetic senses are most prominent, although many other senses might be functional too below some level of consciousness. The distant thing might have many lines of [End Page 69] interpretation that do not enter our experience. The components of the distant thing hang together in its own harmony. The lines of interpretation that do enter of our experience come from an aspect of the distant thing, which is an experienceable thing, given the vast numbers of changes. This allows me to have my metaphysical values as well as the experience of only aspects of them. How does Wildman acknowledge this, if at all?The Ultimate is something on which Wildman and I agree at least 50 percent of the time. We agree that the Ultimate is infinite, that is, non-determinate. I say that the indeterminate Ultimate is empty in itself, and determinate only in what it creates. Wildman agrees with that half the time and the other half thinks the Ultimate is full, super-full, so that the determinate world is the overflow of the full Ultimate. I give the arguments for my account below. His argument is that my claim for the logic of my position supposes without warrant that there exists a logical floor. I agree that I appeal to a logical floor but think it is contingent on the existence of the Ultimate, which I claim is an ontological creative act. What would Wildman say to this?The last topic is how we respond to our conceptions of the Ultimate, which I call our "satisfaction." How are we satisfied in feeling the Ultimate? This question is very personal and so I leave it to Wildman to state what satisfaction he takes. My own satisfactions are two, an Ultimate satisfaction and a Pen-Ultimate one. I explain them below.I. FeelingsRomanticism's doctrine... (shrink)

This is a response to Wang, Huang, and Frisina's commentary on my book, The Good Is One, Its Manifestations Many. The response generally takes the form of re-emphasizing my peculiar stresses on the Confucian tradition while applauding their alternative stresses. I particularly emphasize my metaphysical claims to defend my support for Xunzi; I set my philosophy of religion in the context of East Asian, South Asian, and West Asian philosophies. First let me thank the three commentators for taking my book (...) so seriously and writing such stimulating commentaries.1 I learned from them all: it is a good thing I did not see them before the book was published because they would have caused me to make the book much longer than it is to deal with their questions. I especially thank Yong Huang for organizing this panel. I apologize to all for being prevented from attending because of the weather. Permit me to respond to each of the comments. (shrink)

One enduring legacy of the twentieth century will be the slow, certain transformation of the world from insular civilizations to interactive societies enmeshed in global systems of electronic communication, economics, and politics. Financial news from Thailand or Brazil is often more important globally than political events in the old centers of power. Some bemoan the uncertainty and flux of all this. However, the mutual definition of the world’s societies presents an extraordinary opportunity to humanize a situation that all too quickly (...) could degenerate into a Weberian ‘iron cage’ of truly global proportions. What contribution can the world’s great philosophical traditions make toward humanity’s common task of civilizing the rise of globalization? Here the ancient concept of paideia walks upon the stage of the twenty-first century. (shrink)

This is a systematic theology focusing on what makes Jesus important in Christianity. It studies six families of symbols about Jesus, showing how they are true for some people, not true for others, and not meaningful for a third group. Divine creation is analysed in metaphysical and symbolic terms, and religious symbolism is shown to be wholly compatible with a late-modern scientific world view. Robert Cummings Neville, a leading philosophical theologian, presents and illustrates an elaborate theory of religious symbols according (...) to which God is directly engaged in symbolically shaped thinking and practice. Symbols are not distancing substitutes for God. Theology of symbolic engagement is defended as an alternative to doctrinal or descriptive theology. This major work re-shapes the way we think about Jesus, and will be of value to students, academics, clergy with theological training, and others grappling with the meaning and importance of religious symbols in our age. (shrink)

This article articulates a dialogue between Edward Casey, Cheng Chung-ying, and me that began at the Eastern Division annual meeting in Philadelphia of the American Philosophical Association, in a session sponsored by the International Society for Chinese Philosophy. There, we read brief versions of the papers presented in this issue and commented on one another. Casey represented Continental phenomenology, Cheng the Chinese tradition as he has developed it into onto-generative hermeneutics, and I the melding of American pragmatic and Confucian traditions (...) that I have been developing. (shrink)

Both individually and collectively, the five essays in this groups are brilliant. Each of the authors has worked with extraordinary care and success to represent my position, and they all succeed. The essays work to expound my thought in a progressive order. Bin Song's lays out my approach to comparison, setting it within the larger whole of my philosophy. David Rohr's explores in depth my epistemology and shows its relevance to my philosophy as a whole and also to its application (...) to Christian sermons. Michael Raposa's works through my specific claims about how "praying the ultimate" is its real meaning. Andrew Irvine's carries that thought through to religionless religion, asking: What if that is really... (shrink)

The second volume in a trilogy advancing a systematic philosophical theology, this book explores the realities of human existence articulated by religion. Religion, writes Robert Cummings Neville, articulates existential predicaments and provides venues for ecstatic fulfillment. Like its companion volumes treating ultimacy and religion, Existence advances a systematic philosophical theology to address first-order questions found in the array of Axial Age religions. Issues arising in the major religious traditions are explored through a complex array of philosophical approaches. This second volume (...) shows religion to be the engagement of ultimate realities common to all human beings. Neville finds five problematics relative to ultimate boundary conditions of the human world: the contingency of existence, living under obligation, the quest for wholeness, engagement with others, and the meaning or value in life. Common to all human beings and hence “religion,” the engagement with realities is also historically and culturally bound, becoming simultaneously socially constructed “religions.” Readers will find Neville’s philosophical theology both bold and enlightening, running counter to dominant intellectual trends while richly informed by a long and fruitful engagement with theology, philosophy, and religion, East and West. Robert Cummings Neville is Professor of Philosophy, Religion, and Theology and Dean Emeritus of the School of Theology at Boston University. He is the author of many books, including Realism in Religion: A Pragmatist’s Perspective; Ritual and Deference: Extending Chinese Philosophy in a Comparative Context; and Ultimates: Philosophical Theology, Volume One, all published by SUNY Press. (shrink)

This book introduces Robert Corrington’s “ecstatic naturalism,” a new perspective in understanding “sacred” nature and naturalism, and explores what can be done with this philosophical thought. This is an excellent resource for scholars of Continental philosophy, philosophy of religion, and American pragmatism.

This collection of essays by leading American philosophers honors John E. Smith, a major figure in the struggle for the American profession of philosophy to redefine itself and return to its grander traditions.

Roger T. Ames begins his contribution to Chenyang Li and Franklin Perkins’ edited volume Chinese Metaphysics and Its Problems with this scene from Charles Dickens’ Pickwick Papers, chapter 51: “They [a set of literary articles written for the Eatanswill Gazette] appeared in the form of a copious review of a work on Chinese metaphysics, Sir,” said Pott. “Oh,” observed Mr. Pickwick; “from your pen, I hope?” “From the pen of my critic, Sir,” rejoined Pott, with dignity. “An abstruse subject, I (...) should conceive,” said Mr. Pickwick. “Very, Sir,” responded Pott, looking intensely sage. “He crammed for it, to use a technical but expressive term; he read up for the subject... (shrink)