Review Bracken The One in the Many: A Contemporary Reconstruction of the God-World Relationship.
Classical notions of truth and objectivity have steadily eroded in the face of postmodernism. Meeting this challenge head-on, Joseph Bracken here reconstructs the metaphysical tradition of the West on solid new foundations. Drawing on the thought of Alfred North Whitehead, Ervin Laszlo, and Jürgen Habermas, Bracken presents a new philosophical perspective that roots the relationship between God and the world in community.
Bracken first answers objections to the possibility of developing a new metaphysics in our postmodern age. He then lays out the “vertical” and “horizontal” dimensions of his new metaphysical scheme, a constructive perspective that results in a consciously communitarian understanding of the God-world relationship. The uniqueness of Bracken’s position is its advocacy of a strictly “social ontology” in which the classical relationship of the One and the Many is reversed — not the transcendence of the One over the Many but its emergence out of the Many in dynamic relationship.
Table of Contents
| Foreword | ||
| Acknowledgments | ||
| Introduction | 1 | |
| 1 | The Shift to Intersubjectivity within Catholic Theology | 15 |
| 2 | Language and Objectivity in an Intersubjective Context | 49 |
| 3 | The One and the Many Revisited | 77 |
| 4 | Intersubjectivity: The Vertical Dimension | 109 |
| 5 | Intersubjectivity: The Horizontal Dimension | 131 |
| 6 | The Need for Common Ground in the Religion and Science Debate | 157 |
| App. A: Research Program for the Future | 179 | |
| Glossary of Technical Terms | 218 | |
| Bibliography | 222 | |
| Index | 230 |