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.

Josiah Royce (1855?-1916) has had a major influence on American intellectual life, both popular movements and cutting-edge thought, but his name often went unmentioned while his ideas marched forward. The leading American proponent of absolute idealism, Royce has come back into fashion in recent years. With several important new books appearing, the formation of a Josiah Royce Society, and the re-organization of the Royce papers at Harvard, the time is ripe for Time, Will, and Purpose. Randall Auxier delves into the primary texts written by Royce.

Joel Katzav's survey of the philosophy of Grace Andrus de Laguna's philosophy covers a broad range of ideas, and I have selected three for further development and commentary: (1) the relationship between naturalism and analytic philosophy, (2) the relationship between classical and radical empiricism, and (3) the historical question of where to situate a view such as de Laguna's in the history, the present, and the future of philosophy. I suggest that the view belongs with a group I call the ‘New Naturalists’, including Theodore de Laguna, Susanne Langer, Marjorie Grene, Michael Polanyi, and others who keep philosophy closer to developments in natural and social science than is typical for pragmatists, process philosophers, and analytic philosophers. This is a position somewhere between classical and radical empiricism, but which insists that reductionism is too limiting and unwise, even when restricted to being only a method.

Aleksandr Dugin is sometimes called “Putin’s brain,” and there can be no question that Putin’s global strategy for expanding Russian power has followed quite precisely a strategic plan created, published, and advocated by Dugin beginning in 1996. This aggressive plan of political destabilization, economic hostage-taking, and ultimately militaristic invasions has been defended with a philosophical patchwork called “the Fourth Political Theory.” Dugin claims his “National Bolshevism” can stand alongside communism, fascism, and liberalism as a genuine contender in ontology, the philosophy of history, and political philosophy; and that it is the only theory that stands in genuine opposition to neo-liberalism and corporate capitalism. I show that this view, built from a distortion of Heidegger’s idea of “human-being” as Dasein, is not a coherent philosophy or worldview. I contrast it with personalism, which has always opposed the very aspects of communism, fascism, and liberalism that Dugin opposes, and does so quite effectively and without militarism, expansionism, or the need to take the nation state as some final end of human political development.

The ideas of process philosophy in general, and Alfred North Whitehead in particular, will soon come into greater use and wider familiarity. This emergence of his ideas into wider use will be a great aid to education and to the reforming of our institutions and practices around the very different educational requirements of the sort of world that sits just beyond the horizon of our present vision. There will be discontinuities in the world to come, but there will also be continuities. Whitehead’s ideas about time and possibility, and their practical applications, place us in a position to do better than guess and conjecture about what is coming.

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