This book examines the ideas and influences of a nearly forgotten Swedish-American philosopher, John Elof Boodin (1869–1950). A friend and student of William James and protégé of Josiah Royce at Harvard, Boodin combined Jamesian pragmatism and Roycean idealism in developing original scholarship (nearly sixty articles and eight books) from 1900 to 1947, in addition to a volume of posthumous papers published in 1957. Although he is seldom remembered today, the enduring importance of pragmatism and the rising influence of process theology today suggests that his close reading of early to mid-twentieth-century science and vast grasp of philosophical issues warrants a renewed interest in his work that can be a valuable antidote to the sterile and constricting effects of reductionism and dogmatic materialism prevalent today in both those fields.
Spis treści
Acknowledgments
Prologue: Who Was John Elof Boodin?
Introduction: Science and Its “Mad Clockwork of Epicycles”: The Key to Understanding Boodin
1. Boodin’s Time
2. Pragmatic Realism: Boodin’s Metaphysics
3. Evolution, 1925
4. A Theological Trilogy
5.
The Social Mind: Boodin’s Sociology of Spirit
6. Boodin in a Hostile World
Epilogue
Appendix
Glossary of Important Terms
Notes
Bibliography
Index
O autorze
Michael A. Flannery is Professor Emeritus of UAB Libraries at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He is the author of
Nature’s Prophet: Alfred Russel Wallace and His Evolution from Natural Selection to Natural Theology, among other books.