Books by "Robert S. Brumbaugh"
5 books found
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.
Discussions of modernism and postmodernism in philosophy and the arts are usually based on a narrow reading of the Western tradition and are not conscious of the narrowness. The modern period, beginning with the European Renaissance, spawned many developments, not just the modernist one in terms of which the tradition has been read. From the standpoint of the highroad around modernism, both modernism and post-modernism look like nothing more than two late modern movements, perhaps too preoccupied with themselves and their historical place to engage a swiftly changing world containing more than the Western tradition. The Highroad Around Modernism develops and defends an explicitly non-modernist and non-postmodernist extension of modernity applicable to the problems of world-wide cultural interactions.
"The world is as we interpret it." Arguing that this assumption is a major and pervasive error, Neville demonstrates that the world is the measure of our interpretations. Distinguishing two traditions of hermeneutics, the continental tradition focusing on the interpretation of texts and the American tradition on the interpretation of nature; Neville argues that, since interpretation itself is part of the natural world, a philosophical vision of nature must be restored to currency in order to provide an interpretive theory of the world that can be a measure of interpretation. The natural world must be construed richly enough to be inclusive of human intention and purpose. By taking the discussion of hermeneutics from the context of textuality and placing it within that of nature, Recovery of the Measure provides a non-modernist and non-postmodernist theory of interpretation. The first four chapters and the last four constitute a hermeneutical theory addressing contemporary problems of interpretation situated in the context of the philosophy of nature. The middle chapters provide a compact philosophy of nature dealing with being, identity, value, space, time, motion, and causation.
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.
God the Creator provides a detailed exposition of a conception of God as the creator of everything determinate. It does not defend an established conception such as the Thomist, the Calvinist, or the Process theological idea, but rather elaborates the ancient theme of creation ex nihilo in a new form appropriate to the contemporary world. Part one is a rigorous philosophical development of the idea of God as creator ex nihilo, arguing that an adequate solution to the problem of the one and the many demands such a conception. This part includes a dialectical examination of contemporary and classical theories of being. Part two asks how one can have knowledge of the kind of God described previously; it deals with experience, analogy, and dialectic. Part three applies the conception developed in part one to fundamental religious conceptions such as the object of worship, the nature of religion, and the practices of private and public religious life. It presents theories arising from the conception of creation ex nihilo for the interpretation of religious concern, conversion, faith, certainty, solitude, bliss, service, liturgy, providence, evangelism, dedication, reconciliation, brotherhood, discipline, the integration of public and private religion relative to other dimensions of life, freedom, love, and glory. Though the language arises from the Christian tradition and expresses an orthodox strand of that religion, the argument weaves throughout the concerns of many world religions.