Friday, March 16, 2018

Personalism and the philosophy of religion

Randy Auxier has posted to his academia.edu page a paper, "God as Catholic and Personal," HERE.  The paper is part of an International Philosophical Quarterly issue that is Festschrift to Fordham's W. Norris Clarke, S.J. Of note is that Clarke himself appears in the issue as does James W. Felt, another Jesuit friendly to process metaphysics from a neo-Thomist perspective.

I found the paper particularly interesting for a number of reasons. Readers of After Nature will know that for the majority of my philosophical career (until very recently, in fact) I have taught for Catholic institutions while wrestling with the creation of a process panentheist "neoclassical" metaphysical system, not at all unconducive to neo-Thomism and the metaphysics of Whitehead/Hartshorne alike. Only very recently, around the time I left Immaculata (read about that HERE) and moved to Moravian did I really shift my energies to the creation of a new system which I have been referring to as "speculative naturalism."

Personalism, I think, could certainly use an update to its metaphysical perspective, an update that looks more like "agentialism" in the sense that it could be expanded to include non-human persons mutually recognized as autonomous "agencies" not much different from, or perhaps even equal to, human agencies in most or all respects.