Randall E. Auxier

The papers presented in this volume honor Thomas O. Buford. Buford is Professor Emeritus in Philosophy at Furman University where he taught for over 40 years. Many of the papers in this volume are from former students. But Professor Buford is also a pre-eminent voice of forth generation Personalism, and Boston Personalism in particular. Personalism is a school of philosophical and theological thought which holds that the ideas of “person” and “personality” are indispensable both to an adequate understanding of all metaphysical and epistemological problems, and the key to an adequate theory of ethical and political human interaction. Most personalists assert that personality is an irreducible fact found in all existence, as well as in all interpretation of the meaning of existence and the truth about experience. Anything that seems to exist impersonally, such as inanimate matter, nevertheless can exist and have meaning only as related to some personal being, according to personalists. The Boston Personalist tradition was innaugurated by Borden Parker Bowne and continued by Edgar S. Brightman, Peter Bertocci, John Lavely, Carol Robb and Martin Luther King.

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.

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.

I argue that genuine evolutionary naturalism, which characterized the first generation of pragmatism (Dewey, James, Peirce, and Mead) was replaced by a kind of naturalism that was not in any thorough-going way genuinely evolutionary. Tracing the form of naturalism inherited by Rorty and his generation to Quine's and C.I. Lewis's forms of pragmatism, I argue that this is not naturalism in any empirically defensible sense, mainly because it cannot accommodate scientific inquiry that depends on processual ideas and concepts as opposed to narrowly linguistic concepts.