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John B. Cobb

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John Boswell Cobb Jr. (9 February 1925 – 26 December 2024) was an American theologian, philosopher and environmentalist. He is often regarded as the preeminent scholar in the field of process philosophy and process theology, the school of thought associated with the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. Cobb is the author of more than fifty books. In 2014, Cobb was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

A unifying theme of Cobb's work was his emphasis on ecological interdependence—the idea that every part of the ecosystem is reliant on all the other parts. Cobb argued that humanity's most urgent task is to preserve the world on which it lives and depends, an idea which his primary influence, Whitehead, described as "world-loyalty".

Cobb is well known for his transdisciplinary approach, integrating insights from many different areas of study and bringing different specialized disciplines into fruitful communication. Because of his broad-minded interest and approach, Cobb has been influential in a wide range of disciplines, including theology, ecology, economics, biology, and social ethics.

In 1971, he wrote the first single-author book in environmental ethics, Is It Too Late? A Theology of Ecology, which argued for the relevance of religious thought in approaching the ecological crisis. In 1989, he co-authored the book For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy Toward Community, Environment, and a Sustainable Future, which critiqued global economics and advocated for a sustainable, ecology-based economics. He wrote extensively on religious pluralism and interfaith dialogue, particularly between Buddhism and Christianity, as well as the need to reconcile religion and science.

Cobb was the co-founder and co-director of the Center for Process Studies in Claremont, California. The Center for Process Studies remains the leading Whitehead-related institute, and has witnessed the launch of more than thirty related centers at academic institutions throughout the world, including twenty-three centers in China.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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This—the relation of psychology to fundamental philosophy—is a question which also turns up in dealing with Ethics. There is on the part of those engaged in either of these inquiries a certain impatience against the intermeddling (which is held to be only muddling) of metaphysics with them. It is clear that in a very decided way both psychology and ethics can, up to some extent at least, be treated as what is called…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Mind
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A similar thought underlies Croce's division of the Practical into the two spheres of the Economic and the Ethical. "The economic activity is that which wills and effects only what corresponds to the conditions of fact in which a man finds himself; the ethical activity is that which, although it correspond to these conditions, also refers to something that transcends them. To the first correspond what are called…
John Dewey, Creative Intelligence
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Men expected the sun to rise, but the wind bloweth where it listeth. Certainly from the classical Greek civilisation onwards there have been men, and indeed groups of men, who have placed themselves beyond this acceptance of an ultimate irrationality. Such men have endeavoured to explain all phenomena as the outcome of an order of things which extends to every detail. Geniuses such as Aristotle, or Archimedes, or…
Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the modern world
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John B. Cobb

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