Robert Cummings Neville

Robert Cummings Neville (born May 1, 1939 in St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.) is an American systematic philosopher and theologian, author of numerous books and papers, and ex-Dean of the Boston University School of Theology. J. Harley Chapman and Nancy Frankenberry, editors of a festchrift—a collection of critical essays written in Neville's honor—entitled Interpreting Neville, consider him to be "one of the most significant philosophers and theologians of our time". Neville was Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and has taught at Yale, Fordham, and the State University of New York Purchase. He is now a professor at Boston University He was granted a Doctorate honoris causa by the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Far Eastern Studies in 1996.

Neville's most significant scholarly contribution is arguably his metaphysical theory of being (or being-itself): a new theory that involves an original solution to the ancient problem of the one and the many. He developed this theory for his PhD dissertation at Yale University (graduated 1963), of which his first book, God the Creator, constitutes a substantial revision. Exploring the implications of that theory has enabled him to produce a philosophy of nature that rivals Alfred North Whitehead's in scope and power, as can be seen from his three-volume Axiology of Thinking. The first volume in that trilogy, Reconstruction of Thinking (1981), was hailed by Donald W. Sherburne—editor of the corrected edition of Whitehead's Process and Reality—as "a truly important book. It is the first genuinely neo-Whiteheadian offering on a large, systematic scale." The second volume of the trilogy, Recovery of the Measure: Interpretation and Nature (1989), was also well received. The prominent Confucian scholar and philosopher David L. Hall wrote of it as follows: "Because of its timeliness, the brilliance of its arguments, and the profundity of its conclusions, there is good reason to believe that this work will shortly become the focus of genuine and widespread discussion. With the publication of this latest installment of his Axiology of Thinking, Neville emerges as one of the strongest voices in American philosophy." The complexity, systematic breadth, and analytic depth of Neville's thought is most evident in this second volume of his trilogy.

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