Comments on George Allan’s “Neville’s Ontological Ultimate: A Bridge Too Far”

George Allan, following Santayana following Homer, signals that we are in medias res, in the middle of things. I want to reflect on this in two senses, being in the middle of several philosophical conversations and being in the middle of the cosmos. These come together in many ways regarding a third topic raised by Auxier as well as Allan, namely whether we can go beyond cosmology to metaphysics, or, how to conceive the bridge that might go too far.

George Allan and I have been friends and collaborators longer than I’ve known anyone else here, including my wife. We were classmates at Yale studying Plato and Whitehead, among other things. Then for twenty-five years we were codirectors of the Society for Studies of Process Philosophies, which we explicitly intended to be a counterbalance to the developing orthodoxy of what has become the Claremont school, with its Center for Process Studies, the journal Process Studies, and its rigorous missionary programs in the Far East and Europe. For us, there are lots of process philosophies and lots of ways of studying them. In this, we were influenced by Robert Brumbaugh at Yale, the wild Platonist who loved to proliferate typologies of philosophies, and also by John E. Smith, who taught the pragmatists as process philosophers. The Claremont school pays little attention to the pragmatists. The Claremont school writes about its kind of process philosophy, specified in Process Studies as the philosophies of Whitehead and Hartshorne, and is concerned to get White-head and Hartshorne right with some limited sets of orthodoxies. George and I, and our colleagues, use Whitehead and other process thinkers to build our own philosophies. We don’t have a center but attach ourselves to other groups such as the Metaphysical Society and now IARPT; we don’t have a journal but publish in a variety of other, topically oriented journals, including sometimes Process Studies. Whereas the Claremont school is intensely interested in God and interprets Whitehead mainly through the lens of genetic division, mainly ignoring morphological or coordinate division, we tend to be less hopeful for the process God and focus more on what is useful in process philosophical cosmology. The emphasis the Claremont school places on God many of us shift to the problems of value in nature. Classmate Lewis Ford did not make that shift but instead drifted to the orthodoxy of the Claremont school; but then he studied Whitehead more with William Christian than Robert Brumbaugh. Our classmate Donald Sherburne did not study Whitehead so much as fix him up to be intelligible; when he did study Whitehead’s theory of God, he was dead set against it. Our friends in studies of process philosophies, using them for their own ends, include Frederick Ferre, Randy Auxier, Robert Corrington, Wesley Wildman, George Lucas, John Berthrong, Donald Crosby, and a great many others here and elsewhere. I’ve been fortunate to have taught graduate students for much of my career, the first of whom was Elizabeth Kraus at Fordham, whose own student Judith James is in this lineage, as well as Joseph Grange at Fordham, who has written a distinguished Platonic-process metaphysical trilogy. Steve Odin, now at the University of Hawaii, and Jay Schulkin, the pragmatic neurophysiologist, were my students at SUNY Purchase. Anderson Weekes and Lawrence Cahoone were infected by pragmatic process philosophy at SUNY Stony Brook, where my colleague Justus Buchler was another kind of process pragmatist with a system. Nat Barrett was my student at Boston University; Thurman Willison has carried the flag from BU to Union Seminary; David Rohr has yet to take his qualifying exams. Four of the people I have mentioned have written systematic philosophical trilogies: Fred Ferre, Joseph Grange, George Allan, and I (all published by SUNY Press). George Allan’s The Importances of the Past: A Meditation on the Authority of Tradition, The Realizations of the Future: An Inquiry into the Authority of Praxis, and The Patterns of the Present: Interpreting the Authority of Form exemplify the very best in this legacy of broadly construed...