Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
Illuminating study of the ideas and influences of a near-forgotten American philosopher.
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.
"This is a superbly written, quite concise account of a lesser-known, but clearly important American philosopher of the first half of the twentieth century. Boodin's work clearly deserves to be better known, and Flannery does an excellent job in providing a very well-written account of this interesting individual's contribution." — Patrick H. Armstrong, author of All Things Darwin
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