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The Moral and Religious Philosophy of C. A. Campbell
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
Extract
For over thirty years C. A. Campbell has made major contributions to both ethics and metaphysics. Since these do not correspond to the prevailing fashions in philosophy and theology they are in danger of being under-estimated, if not ignored. I hope to summarise and comment on them as impartially as possible. Inevitably I must be selective. In writing for this journal I have, naturally, chosen to stress those elements in Campbell's thought which are directly or indirectly relevant to religion. Even so, there are many points which I have no space to develop. I shall be content if I say enough to indicate the importance of Campbell's writings for the study of the philosophically crucial topics to which they are devoted.
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References
page 433 note 1 London 1963. Macquarrie (who is one of Campbell's former students) lucidly distinguishes between Campbell's form of idealism and other forms.
page 434 note 1 Of course Campbell considers many other aspects of mental activity. Thus he gives an account of the mind's relation to the body in G. pp. 95–109. He also defends the ontological distinctness of mind from body in a vigorous (and, in my opinion, devastating) critique of Ryle's The Concept of Mind (F. pp. 243–75).
page 435 note 1 This paragraph is based on G, pp. 180–208 and F, pp. 71–143. The manner in which Campbell combines deontology and teleology in his account of self-realisation obviously prepares the way for a religious interpretation of morality in terms of a God to whom we are responsible for the fulfilment of our nature and in whose will we find our beatitude.
page 438 note 1 I am here summarising G. pp. 36–56.
page 441 note 1 In the preface to S. (p. xi) Campbell asserts (rightly) that ‘supra-relationism’ might have served his metaphysical aim better than ‘supra-rationalism’.
page 442 note 1 I wholly agree with John Baillie's statement that ‘the mess into which our modern idealists have so often landed themselves has come from their discarding the idea of creation which Christianity had introduced into Western thought, and their consequent reduction of the fundamental Christian distinction between the created and the uncreated to the pagan (both Greek and Indian) distinction between the apparent and the real’ (The Sense of the Presence of God, Oxford, 1962, p. 19). E. L. Mascall makes the same point (with reference to Bradley) in his He Who Is (London, 1945, p. 78).
page 443 note 1 Appearance and Reality (Oxford, 1930, pp. 396–7).
page 444 note 1 Of course, there are also profound differences between Campbell and both Tillich and Hart-shorne. My sole point is that the monistic and pantheistic tradition of religious thought is still alive in the West.
page 444 note 2 See especially Ninian Smart's Doctrine and Argument in Indian Philosophy (London, 1964).
page 444 note 3 Theories of Primitive Religion (Oxford, 1965, p. 44).
page 444 note 4 Most recently Claude Tresmontant in his Christian Metaphysics (English trans., Dublin, 1965).
page 445 note 1 I do not mean to imply that it cannot also be validated rationally and experientially.