An enormous shift in worldview is taking place all around us, the eminent philosopher Frederick Ferré assures us. After 600 years of the modern era characterized by reductionism, materialism, the mechanistic and linear, Dr. Ferré has created a new philosophical context. It reflects the creativity of the universe itself and gives us a chance to choose between futures.

Dr. Ferré grounded his philosophical approach in values and in a recognition of profound connectedness at every level. What seems to him appropriate to the “post-modern”, as he began calling our era at the beginning of his long career?

“Bring together, say, Christian and Muslim and Jewish and secular and Hindu and Buddhist and science -- all of these ultimate frames of meaning. Tolerate their plurality and interpret all of them themselves from within the metaphysical framework of organicism that values the personalistic.”

Professor Ferré know that his “polymythic personalistic organicism” takes some explaining.

“Start with organicism. It’s the broadest term, the genus term, so it’s last. The essentials? Organicism is intimately relational. It offers the deepest context for things. (It is) grasping, apprehending, comprehending -- all of these are the basic terms of relationality that an organismic thinker would like to put at the center of things.

“And organicism is not an absolute. At no place is there an absolute line between the dead and the living. That is, the universe is in one sense is alive. It’s value creating. And in a very dull sense, it’s aware. The tiniest elements of reality grasp each other, and incorporate aspects of each other into their character too, (Alfred North Whitehead) says. So what you've got really is a churning universe of what Whitehead -- a great mathematician before he was a philosopher -- called a vibratory universe in his wonderful book, Science in the Modern World. I’m very indebted to Whitehead.”

Dr. Ferré describes first non-living, then living, and different degrees of living-ness, more intensity and more complexity, until the behaviors associated with personality then emerge. That leads us to his personalistic.

“Humans are not utterly unique, but there is uniqueness. And that’s the personalistic. At a certain level of complexity, personhood -- the behaviors of personality -- appears in the universe. Personalistic organicism wants to say that that's a very important thing to notice. We can take account mentally of that which is absent from us. And thanks to that, we can anticipate or think about different futures. We can examine intellectually or mentally alternative futures and that gives us a chance to choose between futures, depending upon our norms, our preferences, our sense of what is right.”

And the poly-mythic?

“It’s another level that we’re talking about here. By the ‘mythic level’ I’m talking about ‘that than which there is no wider.’ All these ultimate frames of meaning: Christian and Muslim and Jewish and secular and Hindu and Buddhist and scientific. Multi, poly-myths.”

Why go beyond studying and teaching philosophy to creating a new one?

“I believe in constructive post-modernism, which means that you don't just stop with the ashes and the rubble around. Don’t just deconstruct what’s wrong with the modern. Build something!”