A Peircean Reimagining of Thomas Moore's Spirituality - by Nathan Garcia (Hardcover)

About the Book

Offers an alternative spiritual model to Thomas Moore's soul-heavy spiritual program by drawing from Charles S. Peirce's philosophy of pragmatism.

Book Synopsis

Thomas Moore's psycho-spirituality offers many practical insights for people to cultivate their soulfulness. Underlying his program is the internal dichotomy between imaginal soul and intellectualizing spirit. Moore prioritizes soul and privileges its mystical worldview, which can lead to exaggerating introspectiveness and difficulty bridging a world of imagination with a world of fact. This book devises a pragmatic model of spirituality to serve as an alternative to Moore's Platonically inspired soul program. This model draws from Moore's vibrant character of soul and redirects it toward a critical social dialogue, scientific inquiry, and elevated political participation. Drawing from the Pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce, this book uses his famous Three Categories and Modes of Inference to reinterpret Moore's concepts of soul and spirit. Peirce's metaphysical categories situate soul in distinct relationship with the world, while the epistemological modes guide spirit to educate soul through experience. The concluding tripartite model is called a soulful anthropology, a nascent foundation for a 21st-century American theological anthropology dedicated to the needs and charisms of today's culture.

Review Quotes

"In A Peircean Reimagining of Thomas Moore's Spirituality: Pragmatic Soul, Nathan García provides a groundbreaking study of the works of contemporary psychologist and advocate of the soul, Thomas Moore. In this study, Nathan García uses Peirce's pragmatist philosophy to engage, criticize, and reconstruct Moore's views, overcoming the limitations of his platonistic framework. Nathan masterfully articulates Peirce's system of categories and modes of inference to retrieve the insights of Moore's spiritual teaching and integrate them in a rigorous system of soulful anthropology that promises to be a lasting contribution in the academic study of spirituality." --Paniel Reyes Cárdenas, lecturer, Oblate School of Theology, USA; Honorary Researcher, The University of Sheffield, UK

About the Author

Nathan Garcia is Assistant Professor of Theology at Marian University, USA.