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Malcolm Torry

An actology--introduced by the first book in this series, Actology: Action, Change and Diversity in the Western Philosophical Tradition--is a conceptual structure characterized by action, change, and diversity, and that envisages reality as action in changing patterns. The previous book in this series, Actological Readings in Continental Philosophy, reads a number of continental philosophers through this lens. This new book, An Actology of the Given, takes a somewhat different approach: it explores the concepts of the gift, givenness, giving, and other cognates in the light of reality understood as action in patterns rather than as beings that change: and it does so by discussing some anthropology, the writings of a number of continental philosophers, biblical texts, social policy, and a variety of other givens.

Resource Publications

Actological Explorations

An Actology of the Given

Actological Readings in Continental Philosophy is what it says it is. The book asks how we might understand the writings of a number of continental philosophers actologically: that is, with reality understood as action in changing patterns rather than as beings that change. It also asks how the different continental philosophies might enable us to develop an actology: an understanding of reality as action in changing patterns. The philosophers whom we study are Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, Gilles Deleuze, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gaston Bachelard, Michel Foucault, and Michel Serres. A whole new way of understanding reality casts new light on their philosophies and raises and answers some significant new questions.

Actological Readings in Continental Philosophy

This might look like an ordinary commentary on Mark's Gospel, but it isn't one. It understands reality as Action, actions, change, diversity, movement, and the dynamic, rather than as Being, beings, the unchanging, the unitary, rest, and the static, and it reads Mark's Gospel in the light of that distinctive understanding of reality. It is all about action, change, and diversity, and it understands God, Jesus, and ourselves as action, change, and diversity. 

The initial chapter introduces the action-based understanding of reality as action in changing patterns--an actology, rather than an ontology. Then follows a section-by-section close study of the Gospel. The result is a unique and somewhat unexpected reading of the text and a distinctive theology to match.

Mark’s Gospel: An Actological Reading

Two streams run through the Western philosophical stream: one characterized by Being, beings, the unchanging, the static, and the unitary; and the other by Action, actions, the changing, the dynamic, and the diverse. The former might be represented by Parmenides, Plato, and much of what followed; the latter by Heraclitus, and by rather less of what followed. The book explores the "Action" stream as it wound its way through history, through Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, Maurice Blondel, Henri Bergson, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, process philosophy and theology, Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and John Boys Smith. 

The journey enables us to create the beginnings of an "actology": a way of seeing ourselves, the universe, and God in terms of actions in patterns rather than as beings that change. Such an actology offers a complete alternative narrative far more in tune with the diverse and rapidly changing world in which we live than the ontology that has shaped philosophy, theology, and much else for the past two thousand years.