Randall E. Auxier

_The Quantum of Explanation_ advances a bold new theory of how explanation ought to be understood in philosophical and cosmological inquiries. Using a complete interpretation of Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophical and mathematical writings and an interpretive structure that is essentially new, Auxier and Herstein argue that Whitehead has never been properly understood, nor has the depth and breadth of his contribution to the human search for knowledge been assimilated by his successors. This important book effectively applies Whitehead’s philosophy to problems in the interpretation of science, empirical knowledge, and nature. It develops a new account of philosophical naturalism that will contribute to the current naturalism debate in both Analytic and Continental philosophy. Auxier and Herstein also draw attention to some of the most important differences between the process theology tradition and Whitehead’s thought, arguing in favor of a Whiteheadian naturalism that is more or less independent of theological concerns. This book offers a clear and comprehensive introduction to Whitehead’s philosophy and is an essential resource for students and scholars interested in American philosophy, the philosophy of mathematics and physics, and issues associated with naturalism, explanation and radical empiricism.

This paper aims to consider Peirce and Eco’s approach to signs and semiotics in order to assess their relation to Peirce’s mature pragmatism. Both thinkers attempted to set out a truly general theory of signs, and ran into difficulties on similar points. I show that the responses of Peirce and Eco to the difficulties that arose in seeking a truly general theory of signs were quite different. And yet, the differences are not so deep as to prevent us from thinking of both Peirce and Eco as pragmatists, and perhaps of a similar stripe.

Finally someone has saved future Peirce scholars from having to piece together for themselves the comparative points in Peirce’s development as it concerns his most widely read essays. The significance of the Popular Science Monthly articles of 1877–78 for pragmatism and for Peirce’s thought is universally known. But we have had to dig for ourselves, one by one, repeating each other’s labors, to learn how the ideas at the root of pragmatism evolved in Peirce’s own estimation.Cornelis de Waal here brings together the comprehensive story of these articles and their eventual fate. He documents it in a way that anyone can grasp, and...

George Holmes Howison’s 1895 essay entitled “The Limits of Evolution,” argued that there are four things evolutionary theory does not explain. In examining whether 11 decades have made a difference in these four, I argue that the arrogance of scientists over the past century in refusing to distinguish between full explanations and explanatory hypotheses is in some ways responsible for the fundamentalist backlash against evolutionary science. A scientific community that is honest and forthcoming about its limitations is to be sought. The best response to Intelligent Design, Creation Science, and other current trends in pseudoscience is to be very clear about the limits of evolutionary theory and the scope of scientific explanation.

This dissertation takes as its central problem the several dilemmas associated with the metaphysical implications of meaning and reference, sign and object, symbol and thing symbolized. In recent times, this group of problems has been more passed over than wrestled with, more dismissed and ignored than answered. A practical solution is proposed herein which might be best termed an "heuristic" regarding the language employed in speaking of subjects metaphysical. ;As an heuristic, the theory of analogy runs a middle course between logic and metaphor, concept and image, and offers a means of converting each into the terms of the other. Analogies admit of enough "logical structure" to permit the development of a theory of truth, which provides some measure of assurance about when and where the analogical transformations which the theory makes possible have in fact been carried out properly. Accordingly, such a theory of truth is also offered. ;The analysis given in the first two parts of this three-part study are primarily historical. The difficulties surrounding signs and symbols, meaning and reference, etc., are here set out and clarified. The views of C. S. Peirce, Umberto Eco and W. V. Quine receive primary attention in part one, while those of Ernst Cassirer and Susanne Langer are treated in part two. The former group are discussed mainly with regard to the problems which arise in association with the capacity of a sign or word to "represent" an object. On the other side, the latter two thinkers each propound very detailed theories of symbology. Certain metaphysical problems haunt their theories of the symbol, however, and part two brings these out. ;Part three contains the positive theory of analogy, including a new set of "analogical categories" and the analogical account of truth. Herein, Plato, Aristotle, A. N. Whitehead, Albert Einstein, and John Dewey are discussed in less detail than the five thinkers mentioned earlier. Among other things, an interpretation of the language of relativity physics is offered. Also, post-evolutionary metaphysics is compared and contrasted with traditional metaphysics as a means of working out the theory of analogy

In 1922 Charles Hartshorne, then an aspiring young philosopher, wrote to Edgar Sheffield Brightman, a preeminent philosopher of religion for twenty-three subsequent years and, remarkably, almost every letter was preserved. In their introductory essays, editors Randall Auxier and Mark Davies place the unusually rich and intensive correspondence in its intellectual context and address the relationship between personalism and process philosophy/theology in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and social philosophy.

BOOK REVIEWS 3~3 reaction to them into account. The actual historical dialectic involving Moore, Mal- colm, and Wittgenstein is a good deal more complicated, and more interesting, than the story told here by Stroll. Moving on to Stroll's discussion of Wittgenstein, I should now acknowledge that, so far as I can judge, Stroll offers a largely reliable account of On Certainty. In particular, in the best chapter of the book, on "Wittgenstein's Foundationalism," he makes a convincing case for the view that Wittgenstein, unlike Moore, separates propositional knowledge from the kind of "non-propositional" certainty concerning what "stands fast" for us and which is primarily evinced in our ways of acting. What is less clear to me is just what kind of response to sceptical arguments this amounts to: Stroll says that although at some points Wittgenstein is prepared to countenance, in a relativist spirit which closely adjoins scepticism, radical changes in what is thus cer- tain, by and large towards the end of On Certainty Wittgenstein advances an "absolut- ist" position which rules out such changes. But if this is so , we surely need some arguments why it has to be so. But much here depends on the broader context within which Wittgenstein's position is developed and discussed. Despite noting Wittgenstein's invocation of the conception of man as a "primitive..

The question of the import and role of Christian allusions in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit has received much historical attention, and this continues into the present. Often juxtaposed in this interpretive issue are two questions: Does Hegel think that “the ontological project was first a Greek event from which Christianity would have developed an outer graft”? Or is it more accurate to say that, “for Hegel at least, no ontology is possible before the Gospel or outside it”? In the latter case, Hegel might well place the Greeks precisely where Dante had - in the First Circle of Hell. Those who would make Hegel first a philosopher in the Socratic line tend to emphasize his early work. Those who would make Hegel first a Christian tend to emphasize the later work. This question is too broad to find adequate discussion in the present essay.