This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Reviewing the work of a single author collected and edited by someone other than the author presents itself as a uniquely difficult task. The principles that ordinarily serve to structure and facilitate the review process—logically analyzing a thinker’s argument, judging her contribution to the field, relating her work to the wider context of current intellectual debates or trends, and so on—prove to be of limited or no use. Yet this doesn’t mean there exist no principles by which to critically evaluate (...) the content and significance of such types of works. The principles at one’s disposal merely happen to be those of curation rather than creation.Now there are surely as many ways to curate a body of work as there.. (shrink)

For forty years, Creighton Peden has been engaged in significant scholarship to preserve the nineteenth and twentieth-century tradition of American empirical, pragmatic theology and in particular, the work of the Chicago School. He has edited or coedited several volumes of authors’ unpublished works including one with John Gaston on Edward Scribner Ames, also published in 2011. Further, he has created a series of intellectual biographies on leaders of this unique tradition.Peden’s biography of Ames is organized in (...) three sections. The opening two chapters set the historical context of Ames’s work in the Disciples of Christ denomination and in his own personal autobiography. The middle section.. (shrink)

Humanity takes up space. Human beings, like many other species, also transform spaces. What is perhaps uniquely human is the disposition to qualitatively transform spaces into places that are charged with distinctive kinds of intergenerational significance. There is a profound, felt difference between a house as domestic space and a home as familial place or between the summit of a mountain one has climbed for the first time and the “same” rock pinnacle celebrated in ancestral narratives. Contemporary philosophical uses of (...) the word “place” often pivot on the distinction between “space” and “place” formalized by geographer-philosopher Yi-fu Tuan, who suggested that places incorporate the experiences and aspirations of a people over the course of their moral and aesthetic engagement with sites and locations. While spaces afford possibilities for different kinds of presence—physical, emotional, cognitive, dramatic, spiritual—places emerge as different ways of being present, fuse over time, and saturate a locale with distinctively collaborative patterns of significance. This approach to issues of place, however, is emblematic of what Edward S. Casey has argued are convictions about the primacy of absolute space and time that evolved along with the progressive dominance of the scientific imagination and modern imaginations of the universal. The recent reappearance of place in Western philosophy represents a turn away from abstract and a priori reasoning and back toward phenomenal experience and the primacy of embodied and emplaced intelligence. Places are enacted through the sustainably shared practices of mutually-responsive and mutually-vulnerable agents and are as numerous in kind as we are divergent in the patterns of values and intentions. The contributors to this volume draw on resources from Asian, European, and North American traditions of thought to engage in intercultural reflection on the significance of place in philosophy and of the place of philosophy itself in the cultural, social, economic, and political domains of contemporary life. The conversation of place that results explores the meaning of intercultural philosophy, the critical interplay of place and personal identity, the meaning of appropriate emplacement, the shared place of politics and religion, and the nature of the emotionally emplaced body. (shrink)

Humanity takes up space. Human beings, like many other species, also transform spaces. What is perhaps uniquely human is the disposition to qualitatively transform spaces into places that are charged with distinctive kinds of intergenerational significance. There is a profound, felt difference between a house as domestic space and a home as familial place or between the summit of a mountain one has climbed for the first time and the “same” rock pinnacle celebrated in ancestral narratives. Contemporary philosophical uses of (...) the word “place” often pivot on the distinction between “space” and “place” formalized by geographer-philosopher Yi-fu Tuan, who suggested that places incorporate the experiences and aspirations of a people over the course of their moral and aesthetic engagement with sites and locations. While spaces afford possibilities for different kinds of presence—physical, emotional, cognitive, dramatic, spiritual—places emerge as different ways of being present, fuse over time, and saturate a locale with distinctively collaborative patterns of significance. This approach to issues of place, however, is emblematic of what Edward S. Casey has argued are convictions about the primacy of absolute space and time that evolved along with the progressive dominance of the scientific imagination and modern imaginations of the universal. The recent reappearance of place in Western philosophy represents a turn away from abstract and a priori reasoning and back toward phenomenal experience and the primacy of embodied and emplaced intelligence. Places are enacted through the sustainably shared practices of mutually-responsive and mutually-vulnerable agents and are as numerous in kind as we are divergent in the patterns of values and intentions. The contributors to this volume draw on resources from Asian, European, and North American traditions of thought to engage in intercultural reflection on the significance of place in philosophy and of the place of philosophy itself in the cultural, social, economic, and political domains of contemporary life. The conversation of place that results explores the meaning of intercultural philosophy, the critical interplay of place and personal identity, the meaning of appropriate emplacement, the shared place of politics and religion, and the nature of the emotionally emplaced body. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Naturalistic Empiricism as Process TheologyGary Dorrien (bio)The founders of the Chicago School of Theology sought to develop a fully modernist theology, the first one by their standard. They swept aside the a prioris of Kant and Schleiermacher, declaring that nothing is given and no norm from the past holds legitimate authority. Theologian Shailer Mathews, philosopher of religion George Burman Foster, church historian Shirley Jackson Case, and psychologist of religion (...) Edward Scribner Ames were the founders. They agreed with Ernst Troeltsch that Ritschlian historicism is not true historicism and with William James that lingering over the mystery of subjectivity is a loser for theology and philosophy. Theology had to change to deserve the modernist name. Instead of claiming that religious knowledge is a product of religious experience, theologians should say that religious knowledge is a product of disciplined empirical reflection on experience, especially the experience of external relations. Moreover, the Ritschlian approach of employing a Christian framework to get a Christian answer is illegitimate. The only way to make theology truly modern is to make it as scientific as chemistry, or at least, sociology.The Chicago School had a quintessential figure in each of its first three generations. Mathews was the emblematic founder, Henry Nelson Wieman defined the second generation, and Bernard Meland defined the third generation. Each generation had a process orientation that distinctly ventured theological claims. Mathews led the Divinity School as dean from 1908 to 1933, crafting a socio-historical theology of evolutionary process, functional patterns, value theory, and cultural progress. Wieman developed a theological behaviorism that touted its empirical objectivity and opened the door to the organic metaphysical system of Alfred North Whitehead, though Wieman subsequently tried to close the door. One stream of Wieman’s protégés stuck with his approach and another stream tacked back to Whitehead. Meland synthesized the history of the Chicago School, pulled it in Whitehead’s direction, and later regretted that Whitehead, philosopher Charles Hartshorne, and process theology were too scholastic. Process theology, Meland believed, should be more theopoetic, more culturally attuned, and less scholastic—a prescription with an ample future once feminist theology entered this field. [End Page 5]I. Shailer Mathews and the Early Chicago SchoolThe University of Chicago was the product of John D. Rockefeller’s money, Midwest Baptist anxieties about falling behind other denominations, and William Rainey Harper’s vision of a modern Baptist university. Harper, a Hebrew Bible scholar, and a phenomenally enterprising administrator, founded the university in 1890, stocking it with faculty stars he plucked mostly from New England colleges and universities. Mathews was not a star, or thought to be brilliant. Raised in the staid, thoroughly middle-class, evangelical ethos of Portland, Maine, he was educated at Colby College in Maine, befriending sociologist Albion Small, who became Colby’s president in 1888. Small opened a succession of doors for Mathews—seminary at Newton Theological Institution, a faculty position at Colby in public speaking, graduate study in sociology at the University of Berlin, teaching sociology at Colby, and in 1894, two years after Small moved to Chicago to found the nation’s first sociology department, following Small to Chicago. Harper chaired the Old Testament Department, Mathews’s former teacher at Newton, Ernest DeWitt Burton, chaired the New Testament Department, and Mathews was hired to teach New Testament history, never mind that he had no training in it except whatever Burton had taught him. Burton told Mathews not to worry—his Berlin training in sociology should apply just fine to New Testament history. The University of Chicago had a mission to make religion relevant again, and Mathews could help with that.1Harper enlisted him to serve as an extension of himself in Harper’s numerous endeavors. Mathews was really good at representing Harper, speaking for him on the road, hustling back to Chicago for classes, and enjoying his dual role. To ground himself in his acquired field, Mathews wrote a series of articles on “Christian Sociology” that became his first book, The Social Teaching of Jesus (1897). Christian sociology, he explained, was the use of social science to explicate the objective meaning of Christianity, an overdue enterprise. A scientific reading... (shrink)

Gerald Birney Smith is an all too neglected figure among the luminaries of the early Chicago School. No less than the others—Shailer Mathews, George Burman Foster, Shirley Jackson Case, Edward Scribner Ames, et al.—he is worthy of attention. For one thing, Smith is a unique figure in bridging the historical concerns of his Chicago contemporaries and the more philosophical concerns of the next generation of Chicago theologians, especially Bernard E. Meland and Henry Nelson Wieman. Indeed, Meland saw (...) his early “mystical naturalism” as a continuation of a project that Smith, his mentor, called by that term in his later works. Quite apart from being a bridge figure, Smith deserves attention in his own.. (shrink)

This book offers another in a long line of Creighton Peden’s contributions to understanding the thought of perhaps neglected religious thinkers in the American liberal tradition. Peden has stated that his approach in writing about figures like Gerald Birney Smith, George Burman Foster, and Edward Scribner Ames has not been critical or even comparative, but explicative. His goal is to make more of their work more accessible. And Peden is especially well positioned to do so in the (...) case of Bernard Meland, as he has been a long-standing student, colleague, interlocutor, and ultimately literary executor to Meland.The book has a slightly quirky structure. The first twenty or so pages are an intellectual autobiography.. (shrink)

In considering the rise of American Humanism, we will explore these developments, as expressed in the Free Religious Association and the early Chicago School of Philosophy. Brief consideration will be given to the developments in the Unitarian Church in America which led to the formation of the FRA in 1867. The focus on the FRA will center on four key founders, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Octavius Brooks Frothingham, Francis Ellingwood Abbot and William James Potter. Following the World’s Congress of Religions and (...) the adoption of Abbot’s “free religion” in a revised constitution for Unitarianism in 1895, the emphasis shifts to the early philosophy department at the University of Chicago and the rise of Humanism. Contributions and influences on the development of Humanism by George Burman Foster, Edward Scribner Ames, and Albert Eustace Haydon will be explored. (shrink)

The years between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of World War II are often seen as a golden age of philosophical thought in the United States, thanks in part to the early development of pragmatism. Together, the pragmatists and other classical American philosophers of the time period addressed many of the issues still under debate in philosophy today, and their influence is still evident. Yet many of their contributions to philosophy of religion have not yet received (...) the critical analysis they deserve. In Philosophy of Religion in the Classical American Tradition, J. Caleb Clanton reconstructs, evaluates, and extends a variety of views in philosophy of religion drawn from, inspired by, or developed in response to the classical American philosophical tradition. Problem-based and argument-driven, each chapter explores a salient issue in philosophy of religion by engaging with such thinkers as C. S. Peirce, William James, Josiah Royce, George Santayana, John Dewey, and Edward Scribner Ames, as well as two prominent contemporary inheritors of the classical American philosophical tradition, Cornel West and Richard Rorty. Clanton addresses a wide variety of topics, including the reality of God, the veridicality of mystical experience, the problem of evil, the efficacy of petitionary prayer, religious naturalism, and the role of religion in the democratic public square. For scholars and teachers of philosophy and religious studies, Philosophy of Religion in the Classical American Tradition will serve as a valuable resource for engaging with the history of philosophy of religion in the United States. (shrink)

The Nature of God explores a perennial problem in the philosophy of religion.

This is a book grounded in the real ethical challenges of modern business practice, with a world-religious perspective so necessary in an era of globalization.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is an open access, dynamic reference work designed to organize professional philosophers so that they can write, edit, and maintain a reference work in philosophy that is responsive to new research. From its inception, the SEP was designed so that each entry is maintained and kept up to date by an expert or group of experts in the field. All entries and substantive updates are refereed by the members of a distinguished Editorial Board before they (...) are made public. (shrink)

It was proposed that the data from Monte Carlo statistical investigations be subjected to analysis of variance methods rather than the conventional techniques of tabling, graphing, and inspecting the data. Two examples in which analysis of variance methods were applied to published Monte Carlo studies were presented. It was suggested that balanced factorial designs should be used whenever possible in Monte Carlo studies so that analysis of variance methods would be directly applicable. Finally, three advantages of analysis of variance methods (...) over conventional techniques were described and analysis of variance methods were contrasted with a possible alternative analytical method, multiple regression analysis. (shrink)

National Book Award Finalist. How did humanity originate and why does a species like ours exist on this planet? Do we have a special place, even a destiny in the universe? Where are we going, and perhaps, the most difficult question of all, "Why?" In The Meaning of Human Existence, his most philosophical work to date, Pulitzer Prize–winning biologist Edward O. Wilson grapples with these and other existential questions, examining what makes human beings supremely different from all other species. (...) Searching for meaning in what Nietzsche once called "the rainbow colors" around the outer edges of knowledge and imagination, Wilson takes his readers on a journey, in the process bridging science and philosophy to create a twenty-first-century treatise on human existence—from our earliest inception to a provocative look at what the future of mankind portends. Continuing his groundbreaking examination of our "Anthropocene Epoch," which he began with The Social Conquest of Earth, described by the New York Times as "a sweeping account of the human rise to domination of the biosphere," here Wilson posits that we, as a species, now know enough about the universe and ourselves that we can begin to approach questions about our place in the cosmos and the meaning of intelligent life in a systematic, indeed, in a testable way. Once criticized for a purely mechanistic view of human life and an overreliance on genetic predetermination, Wilson presents in The Meaning of Human Existence his most expansive and advanced theories on the sovereignty of human life, recognizing that, even though the human and the spider evolved similarly, the poet's sonnet is wholly different from the spider's web. Whether attempting to explicate "The Riddle of the Human Species," "Free Will," or "Religion"; warning of "The Collapse of Biodiversity"; or even creating a plausible "Portrait of E.T.," Wilson does indeed believe that humanity holds a special position in the known universe. The human epoch that began in biological evolution and passed into pre-, then recorded, history is now more than ever before in our hands. Yet alarmed that we are about to abandon natural selection by redesigning biology and human nature as we wish them, Wilson soberly concludes that advances in science and technology bring us our greatest moral dilemma since God stayed the hand of Abraham. (shrink)