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| Biography | |||
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During my last two years in high school, I began reading
some selections from my grandmother’s edition of the Harvard Classics.
After reading some fiction, poetry, and historical works, my attention
was captured by the writings of Descartes and Emerson. I realized that
these thinkers were exploring important issues and dealing with them
in a different way from the novelists, the poets, and the historians.
I resolved to take some courses in philosophy when I went to college. At Emory University, I first decided on a wide-ranging
major in a humanities program which encompassed literature, history,
philosophy, and the arts. However, I gradually came to realize that
I was most intrigued by the issues and theories that arose in philosophy.
I was especially attracted to thinkers like Plato and Leibniz who constructed
comprehensive systems designed to illuminate many different aspects
of human experience. During my final semester, I wrote an honors paper
in which I explored the relationship between form and process in the
thought of Alfred North Whitehead, an Anglo-American thinker who developed
a view of reality which is now characterized as “process philosophy.”
I chose to do graduate work at Johns Hopkins because the
history of ideas was emphasized in the philosophy program at that time.
There I was able to delve more deeply into the metaphysical systems
of Plato, Leibniz, and Whitehead. In my dissertation, I explained and
defended Whitehead’s claim that the past has an actuality just
as robust, although significantly different, from the actuality of the
present. I also discussed the pivotal role of the principle of creativity
in Whitehead’s thought. I have now been at Sewanee for 33 years and have lived
through many changes in both the college and the philosophy department.
When I came to Sewanee in 1968, most of the courses in the department
dealt in some way with the history of philosophy. Now we have offerings
in most areas of contemporary interest, although we still have a strong
program in the history of philosophy. The range of the courses I teach
has also changed. Initially, most of my courses were oriented toward
the history of philosophy. Now I teach courses in logic, contemporary
moral issues, and business ethics in addition to those that focus on
historical periods and thinkers. Much of my scholarly work has been devoted to an interpretation and defense of Whitehead’s philosophical legacy. Although Whitehead’s comprehensive approach to philosophy is out of style today, I am convinced that he has constructed a viable framework for understanding and illuminating many different areas of human experience. More recently, I have been working on issues in contemporary ethics, especially the ethics of care and virtue ethics. I am also exploring connections between Whitehead’s theory of the nature of reality and the prominent role which sympathy and compassion occupy in the moral perspective of the ethics of care.
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