recently completed dissertations in process thought...
2008
Niemoczynski, Leon J. "The Sacred Depths of Nature: An Ontology of the Possible in the Philosophy of Peirce and Heidegger." Southern Illinois University, 2008: 314 pages.
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This dissertation constructively applies C.S. Peirce’s pragmaticism to a religious understanding of nature. I explore how the modality of possibility functions in the disclosure of a “divine life,” that is, a life of the developing cosmos taken to be sacred in its continual processes of evolutionary growth and transformation. Possibility, found in Peirce’s category of experience known as “Firstness,” provides the ontological conditions required for any felt qualitative experience—experience that is the site for potential religious experience. “Religious” experience here means the ecstatic contraposition of finite being before “infinite” being. I investigate infinite being first as an honorific sheer availability of being (potential or possible being: becoming) and then in terms of how inquiry may reveal nature to be an encompassing infinite that locates and situates finite organisms. It is my thesis that possibility serves as a ground for the disclosure of this infinite, “the divine life,” by enabling its presence to come forward as a feeling of the sacred— a feeling found when inquirers muse over nature and establish beliefs about the universe in which they are situated. To the end of making these claims more concrete, I draw on figures ranging from Heidegger and Schelling to Hartshorne and Whitehead so as to identify how possibility may serve as ground (Abgrund) for divine disclosure, and to identify understandings of existence that take nature to be a sacred life of φύσις (phusis), dynamically revealing and concealing before finite and situated organisms.