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  • The Things in Heaven and Earth: An Essay in Pragmatic Naturalism by John Ryder
  • Robert S. Corrington
The Things in Heaven and Earth: An Essay in Pragmatic Naturalism. John Ryder . New York : Fordham University Press , 2013 . 328 pp. $28 paper.

This is a wonderful and important book that highlights a conception of naturalism that has its roots in the Columbia School. Readers of this journal are [End Page 278] very much aware of and have often participated in the work of the Chicago School of religious naturalism, but the Columbia School, more secular and less religiously inclined, may not be as well known. John Ryder brings the Columbia School to life in his account of how this more secular naturalism aligns itself to the work of Dewey, Woodbridge, Randall, and above all Justus Buchler. Santayana was an important source of inspiration for the Columbia naturalists who preferred his cooler naturalism to more religiously hot varieties. The philosophers at Columbia University, from the turn of the previous century until Buchler left Columbia for Stony Brook in 1971, were committed to the view that nature is all that there is and that science is the most important mode of inquiry that we have vis-a-vis the innumerable orders of the world.

Upon assuming his Chair at Stony Brook, Buchler’s work found a new audience among a group of gifted doctoral students who continue to carry his work forward. One can now appropriately talk of the Stony Brook School as a continuation of the Columbia School. John Ryder, who wrote his dissertation under Buchler, is one the most important voices in the Stony Brook School of pragmatic naturalism. For those who feel more comfortable in a humanistic form of naturalism, this book will be highly congenial reading. And for those who feel the strong pull to Deweyian notions of social reconstruction, there will be much to challenge and enrich that lure toward conditions of justice.

The first half of the book has the work of Justus Buchler as its skeletal structure, while the second half is shaped and driven by the social and political thought of John Dewey. These twin poles provide a rigorous and compelling architecture for the exposition of Ryder’s own conception of a capacious naturalism that can shed light on the nature of nature and on key issues in social reconstruction. For Ryder, pragmatic naturalism is the perspective that best enables us to grasp and creatively shape the nexus where the finite human being encounters the vastness of an ordinal nature. By “ordinal” is meant a nature that is constituted by innumerable intersecting and relevant orders serving to shape personal and collective identity across the time process. Note, however, that for Ryder, as for Buchler, nature is not some superorder or some extensive continuum that would provide the grand contour for all other orders. The ordinal perspective leaves process panentheisms far behind. Nature is orders, never “the” order, just innumerable orders prevailing in innumerable ways. There is no set of sets or a perfect self-representative series ala Josiah Royce.

A few words need to be said regarding Buchler, as his work still has not worked its way into the mainstream of metaphysical discourse. Part of the reason is that it is so radical that it not only challenges current systems of metaphysics (e.g., process, Neo-Leibnizian, New-Materialism, Neo-Hegelian, etc.) but inverts the very idea of what metaphysics is and does. In Buchler’s [End Page 279] perspective it is imperative that we refrain from asserting that everything in nature is one kind of thing. Thus the traditions have posited such “entities” as monads, actual occasions, spirit, proper names, essences, sensa, qualia, pure experience, the transcendental ego as world-creating, and whatnot. For Buchler and Ryder, ordinal metaphysics does something dramatically different. It simply denies that any trait can be predicated to what it is in its “totality.” Thus instead of a universal trait, the ordinal perspective puts it boldly: “Whatever is in whatever way it is is a natural complex.” Note that the phrase “natural complex” is utterly different from the traits in the above list of metaphysical candidates. To call...

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