1. General Interests
I am interested in all aspects of philosophy (with the exception of Formal Logic), most of theology, and several of history (particularly politics and the history of ideas). Many of these interests focus upon the nature, status and destiny of the person and an interest in 'personalist' philosophers.
I have been especially inspired by the philosophical works of Edmund Burke, Michael Polanyi, Max Scheler and R.G. Collingwood, and have published books and articles on them and further applying their ideas, above all those of Polanyi.
(See Publications.)
If you have visited the Appraisal web pages, you will have seen that it takes a special interest in Polanyi. I never met him, though soon after his death in 1976 I met and became great friends with his widow, Magda Polanyi. I joined the committee (self-appointed and self-perpetuating) of the Convivium Group, dedicated to promoting interest in Polanyi, at its inception in 1974 and remained in it until its disbandment in 1994. In 1996 I launched Appraisal to continue that work but in wider context. In 1991 I attended the Polanyi Centenary Conference, held in Budapest, of the newly founded Michael Polanyi Liberal Philosophical Association, with which I have been in touch ever since. I joined their project, sponsored by the Central European University, on 'The Tradition of Central European Liberal Philosophy'. My Beyond Liberalism (1998) is a revised version of my contribution to that project. I have recently been invited to be an editiorial advisor for their journal, Polanyiana.
I have also been asked to become a Co-Editor of the new Polish journal, Personalism.
If you have visited the Blaga web pages, you will also know that, following a chance invitation to the Blaga Centennial Conference at Mangalia in 1995, I became interested in his philosophy, and am trying to introduce it to the English-speaking world.
In addition to these links, I also belong to the John Macmurray Fellowship and the R.G. Collingwood Society.
2. Current Interests
Despite my distrust of formal logic, I have become convinced of the validity of the Ontological Argument, not in the commonly discussed versions, but in the simple recognition that Necessary Being (which, like contingent beings and unlike impossible oness, can exist, but also, unlike contingent beings, cannot not-exist) must exist. But how far can we push logic beyond that? The ultimate Being ('Being', 'God', 'It is', 'The One', 'Brahma', etc.) has usually been assumed to be one and eternal (not merely immortal but timeless). But can we prove this? I think we should be able to prove it, and would like to make a sustained effort at producing adequate proofs, yet I know that they may be elusive. For example, Why could there not be two or more Necessary Beings? Because, I would reply, they would necessarily be related to each other and thus really one after all: at the least they would be elements in one system, parts of one whole, Three Persons in one Substance. But that presupposes that Necessary Being necessarily has all its attributes and cannot have any contingently. If it could, it could change into something else and so it would not exist and thus would not be Necessary Being after all.
When I have completed that, I hope to redeem the promise made at the end of The Structure of Value to write a book on ethics which will apply, in a more flexible and comprehensive manner, Collingwood's conception of a scale of forms to Scheler's conception of the levels of a person (starting on the 'outside' or at the bottom with effects of actions, and working inwards or upwards via actions, intentions, basic dispositions, to the person himself) with their values, and showing how each lower level necessarily involves those above and is not really itself in isolation from them (as in Collingwood's conception and what I term 'self-transcendence') and also that each higher level must express itself on lower levels in order to be itself (e.g. actions can be defined and have value only in terms of intentions, and similarly intentions are unreal and valueless or definitely disvaluable unless appropriately expressed in actions). The 'isms' in ethics arise from attempts to isolate one such level and to disregard the rest or falsely Following that, a similar study of ideals of the human good, and then one to show how both 'the good man' and the 'good for man' presuppose and can be united in philosophical and specifically Christian theism.
3. Academic Qualifications:
- BA (Hons. 2/1) (Philosophy with subsid. History). University of Nottingham, 1963
- M.Ed. (research) 'Emotion and Education with special reference to D.H. Lawrence', University of Leicester (part-time) 1973
- BD (Hons. 2/1) (external), University of London, 1976
- Ph.D. 'Transcendence and Immanence in the Philosophy of Michael Polanyi and Christian Theism', (external), University of London, 1982
4. Teaching Posts:
- Lecturer, Education and Religious Studies, Loughborough College of Education, 1972-77
- Senior Lecturer, Education, Sokoto College of Education, Nigeria, 1980-2
- Senior Lecturer, Philosophy of Education, The University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad, 1984-8
- Part-time Tutor, Continuing Education, University of Nottingham, 1988-2002
|
