Merrimack College

Faculty Member, Philosophy

About

BIO

Ruddy entered the Dominican Order in 1960. He received his doctorate in Comparative Philosophy from Madras University in Chennai, India in 1979. (His thesis, read by J. N. Mohanty and T. M. P. Mahadevan, detailed the discovery of a utterly new phenomenology of relation-like (adesse) objectivity over against the (inesse) objectivity of Husserlian intentionality.) From 1975 to 1981, he taught Husserlian phenomenology, South Indian religion, and Indian Philosophy at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. During those years he also taught Thomistic Philosophy at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology (also in Berkeley).He taught two years at Seattle University. In 1984 he left both teaching and the priesthood, and went into business. From 1998-2008 he was a business intelligence analyst for the IBM Cognos software products. After retiring, he began teaching philosophy at Stonehill College. He now teaches concurrently at Rhode Island College and Merrimack College. This summer he will be teaching a  philosophy course at the Univesity of Massachusetts. He has published seminal articles in the Indian Philosophical Annual, and also a book entitled Braille for a Storm of Loss (Oyex Press, Berkeley, 1978).


From the Wikipedia article on Phenomenology:

The work of Jim Ruddy in the field of comparative philosophy, combined the concept of Transcendental Ego in Husserl's phenomenology with the concept of the primacy of self-consciousness in the work of Sankaracharya. In the course of this work, Ruddy uncovered a wholly new eidetic phenomenological science, which he called "convergent phenomenology." This new phenomenology takes over where Husserl left off, and deals with the constitution of relation-like, rather than merely thing-like, or "intentional" objectivity.



CURRENT PROJECT:

The following is the first page of a paper I am now working on entitled, "Stein's Way:"


In this paper we define subject-consciousness as a non-human consciousness that knows everything that it is possible to know simply by gazing into itself; and we define object-consciousness as a limited consciousness that demands outside material objects first and must then extrapolate inward, step by step, to achieve some kind of participatory “subject-consciousness” within itself. In the medieval schools, at least up until the logical vagaries of Nominalism,  the ultimate paradigm for consciousness in general (both subject- and object- consciousness) was a rather archaic, triune hierarchy consisting of, first, the uncreated subject-consciousness of God; second, the created subject consciousness of the so-called separate substances (separatus); and third, the derived object-consciousness of ordinary human life. By the time of Descartes, the modal shift away from such a hierarchy was complete, and the only possible paradigm for consciousness, in our modern era, became a lone, orphaned “subject-consciousness,” over against a world that, in itself, grew more and more radically unknowable.

Edith Stein, in Potency and Act, applied her assiduously-mastered Husserlian phenomenological method full force to that selfsame triune hierarchy above. She even began carrying out detailed intentional analyses, including noetic and noematic analyses, into the very depths of subject-consciousness itself. How was she able to do so?  Had her courageous use of the phenomenological method enabled her to arrive at an utterly new realm of phenomenologically-available material?  These questions demand some answer. For it is clear that, by venturing forward to synthesize Aquinas and Husserl into a single eidetic viewpoint, Stein took enormous risks. By what first, tentative steps could any human mind hope to start forth on such an extraordinary journey? In this paper we will attempt to probe more deeply into what was actually occurring along “Stein’s Way,” in order to get at some of its more radical sources.

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