Books by Robert S. Corrington

Is nothingness found in nature or is it in some realm disconnected from nature? Nature and Nothingness: An Essay in Ordinal Phenomenology argues for the former and explores four types of nothingness as found in nature: holes in nature, totalizing nothingness in horror, naturing nothingness, and encompassing nothingness. Using ordinal phenomenology, Robert S. Corrington reveals the great perennial fissuring within the one nature that there is. The book includes a detailed analysis of religious violence as it correlates to the hoes in nature, such as anxiety, bereavement, loss, fear of fragmentation, and loss of identity. It also examines the various ways in which horror is encountered in a literary context, using the work of Edgar Allen Poe and H. P. Lovecraft. The analysis is comparative and makes use of feminist philosophy as well as Buddhist, Taoist, theosophical, and American philosophy. Using resources from ecstatic naturalism and deep pantheism, Corrington argues that though nothingness takes many forms, they are all guises of the same vast Nothingness.

This book is a study in a new form of religious naturalism called ';Deep Pantheism,' which has roots in American Transcendentalism, but also in phenomenology and Asian thought. It argues that the great divide within nature is that between nature naturing and nature natured, the former term defined as ';Nature creating itself out of itself alone,' while the latter term defined as ';The innumerable orders of the World.' Explorations are made of the connections among the unconscious of nature, the archetypes, and the various layers of the human psyche. The Selving process is analyzed using the work of C.G.Jung and Otto Rank. Evolution and involution are compared as they relate to the Encompassing, and the priority of art over most forms of religion is argued for.

In Nature's Religion, distinguished theologian and philosopher Robert S. Corrington weaves together the concept of infinite semiosis with that of the transference to show that the self does have access to something in nature that is intrinsically religious.

In this account of his struggle with manic depressive disorder, Corrington presents an arguement for rethinking the nature of this malady. He represents one person's triumph over a potentially crippling disease and shows that the quest for wholeness can support the struggle with manic-depression.

A major contribution to American philosophical thought [which] has re-opened American naturalistic philosophy.-Theological Studies

Nature's Sublime uses a radical new form of phenomenology to probe into the deepest traits of the human process in its individual, social, religious, and aesthetic dimensions. Starting with the selving process the essay describes the role of signs and symbols in intra and interpersonal communication. At the heart of the human use of signs is a creative tension between religions symbols and the novel symbols created in the various arts. A contrast is made between natural communities, which flatten out and reject novel forms of semiosis, and communities of interpretation, which welcomes creative and enriched signs and symbols. The normative claim is made that religious sign/symbol systems have a tendency toward tribalism and violence, while the various spheres of the aesthetic are comparatively non-tribal, or even deliberatively anti-tribal. The concept/experience of beauty and the sublime is meant to replace that of religious revelation. The sublime is not merely an internal mode of attunement, contra Kant, but comes from the very depths of nature in the potencies of nature naturing.

Corrington achieves the most judicious presentation of Peirce's philosophy made so far, an ideal introduction for the beginning student and 'balancer' for Peirce sophisticates. -John Deely, Loras College