Robert Smid is senior lecturer in philosophy and religion at Curry College in Milton, Massachusetts. This book, a slightly revised version of his recent PhD dissertation from Boston University, is dedicated to Robert Cummings Neville, under whose guidance it was originally written. As the title suggests, this volume explores various methods of comparative philosophers in the pragmatist and process traditions of American philosophy. Smid thus focuses his analytic lens on William Ernest Hocking (1873–1966), F. S. C. Northrop (1893–1992), the collaborative work of David Hall (1937–2001) and Roger Ames (1947-), and Neville himself (1939-). The four chapters at the heart of the book—between the introduction and final comparative chapter—are focused on an exposition and critical analysis of these comparative philosophers.

Hocking, longtime professor of philosophy at Harvard University, is presented as a comparative philosopher for the “emerging world culture.” His crucial role in the drafting of Re-Thinking Missions—one of the most important documents in Protestant mission theory published by the Laymen’s Foreign Missions Inquiry Commission of Appraisal in 1932—and his seminal essays for the fledgling subfield of comparative philosophy, “Chu Hsi’s Theory of Knowledge” (1936) and “Value of the Comparative Study of Philosophy” (1944), the latter a product of the first East-West Philosophers’ Conference in 1939, are carefully delineated. Smid is convincing about Hocking’s important contributions in putting comparative philosophy on the philosophical agenda at midcentury, as well as about the centrality of his vision of synthesizing insights from Eastern and Western philosophical traditions. However, the scope...