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.