America's Forgotten Poet-Philosopher by Michael A Flannery

America's Forgotten Poet-Philosopher by Michael A Flannery

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 centuryBoodin'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

Michael A. Flannery is Professor Emeritus of UAB Libraries at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He is the author of Nature's Prophet: Alfred Russel Wallace and His Evolution from Natural Selection to Natural Theology, among other books.