Corrington has described his main life focus as the "development of a philosophical perspective called 'ecstatic naturalism'." This perspective attempts to provide an alternative to contemporary metaphysical perspectives such as materialism on the one side and process theology on the other. In ecstatic naturalism there exists nothing except nature, although the term nature assumes a much wider meaning than it has within the narrow confines of reductionist materialism, which happens to coincide with today's western consensus reality. Specificially, his ecstatic naturalim asserts that nature is all that there is, that there is no one trait found in every order, that teleology is a deeply problematic notion, especially as overused in process thought, and that nature is divided into two modes: 1) nature naturing, that is, nature creating itself out of itself alone, and 2) nature natured, that is, the world's orders. Most sharply, the word "nature" has no referent.

Corrington's research involves an interdisciplinary approach to problems of meaning, semiotics, and unconscious processes in the self/world correlation. His long-time interest in parapsychology is focused most recently on the issue of how the unconscious, in its various modes, interacts with the forms of semiosis (sign transmission) that occur in psi phenomena.

Robert S. Corrington is the author of 9 books and 70 articles in the fields of philosophy, theosophy, theology, psychoanalysis, and semiotics as well as editor of several books on metaphysics and semiotics. He has also authored two plays.

Books

• Editor (with Hausman, Carl and Seebohm, Thomas M.): Pragmatism Considers Phenomenology (1987)
• The Community of Interpreters: On the Hermeneutics of Nature and the Bible in the American Philosophical Tradition (1987, 2nd ed. 1995)
• Editor (with Marsoobian, Armen and Wallace, Kathleen): Buchler, Justus Metaphysics of Natural Complexes (1990)
• Editor (with Marsoobian, Armen and Wallace, Kathleen): Nature's Perspective: Prospects of Ordinal Metaphysics (1991)
• Nature and Spirit: An Essay in Ecstatic Naturalism (1992)
• An Introduction to C.S. Peirce: Philosopher, Semiotician, and Ecstatic Naturalist (1993)
• Ecstatic Naturalism: Signs of the World (1994)
• Nature's Self: Our Journey from Origin to Spirit (1996)
• Nature's Religion (1997)
• A Semiotic Theory of Theology and Philosophy (2000)
• Wilhelm Reich: Psychoanalyst and Radical Naturalist (2003)
• Riding the Windhorse: Manic Depressive Disorder and the Quest for Wholeness (2003)

Plays

• Black Hole Sonata (or Waiting for Steven Hawking)
• One, Two, Three

Robert S. Corrington has also contributed to numerous academic journals, e.g. Chrysalis, International Philosophical Quarterly, and the American Journal of Semiotics.