The Faith of Emerson

This book provides an approach to Emerson that walks the line between traditional and revisionist interpretations of his life and works. The author presents Emerson as a man of faith whose unique synthesis of Kantian and Vedantic philosophies resulted in a view of faith that was one hundred years ahead of its time.

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In The Faith of Emerson: American Transcendentalism, Kantian Epistemology, and Vedantic Thought, Daniel A. Campana makes the case for seeing Emerson as a prophet for a new concept of religious faith that transcends the boundaries of particular religious traditions. By tracing Emerson’s intellectual development from his early years to his last works, Campana demonstrates the progression in Emerson’s thought from a dogmatic to a dynamic sense of living faith. He presents Emerson’s synthesis of Kantian and Vedantic philosophies as the key to understanding his life and works from a new perspective, forging a novel connection between Emerson’s transcendental idealism and developments in contemporary analytic philosophy of religion. In both cases, post-Kantian epistemology provides the impetus for a notion of faith as an active, interpretive process that is not bound to religious truth claims. Vedantic monism supplies an image for how one might understand this interpretive process in its larger, metaphysical context. This book provides us a vision of life as participation in a narrative greater than ourselves, a narrative that may be spoken of in the language of various religious traditions but is not constrained to any one.