Donald A. Crosby

The Most Important Course in the University

Three types of freedom are distinguished, discussed, and related to one another. These types of freedom are argued to lie at the heart of liberal education and to elucidate essential meanings of the term “liberal” in that context. These freedoms of a liberal arts education are also shown to bear crucially on the intellectual, moral, and spiritual development of undergraduate students in the university.

Free will in process perspective

Abstract Positions in the ongoing debate about free will are characterized and compared, that is, determinism, indeterminism, chaoticism, stronger and weaker versions of indeterminism and chaoticism, hard and soft determinism, and libertarianism. Libertarianism is claimed to be the most adequate of these alternatives and defended from the process perspectives of Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, and the psychologist-philosopher, William James. The defense is developed by responding to three objections to libertarianism: (1) that scientific explanations in psychology and other disciplines require belief in causal determinism; (2) that indeterminism, assumed by libertarianism, makes impossible moral or other kinds of responsibility for human acts; and (3) that libertarianism must assume an untenable mind-body dualism. The article concludes that libertarianism is a more subtle and cogent position than most of its opponents have recognized, that determinism has glaring deficiencies of its own, and that libertarianism is an appropriate position for psychology—even for a scientific psychology.

Emergentism, Perspectivism, and Divine Pathos

and contrasting his views with theirs, and in that way elaborating and clarifying Hartshorne’s views. He adds his own pertinent, provocative reflections to the mix and for the most part rises to Hartshorne’s defense on disputed matters. The result is a carefully researched, imaginatively organized, and thoughtfully developed discussion of interrelated themes running throughout Hartshorne’s thought. I am deeply appreciative of the formidable amount of work and analysis that has gone into Dombrowski’s book and commend him for it. The critical comments to which I shall devote the rest of this essay are not meant in any way to detract from this appreciation. My discussion is directed exclusively at ideas expounded by Hartshorne himself, at least as Dombrowski presents these ideas. I am not sufficiently informed by my own firsthand readings of Hartshorne’s writings to question Dombrowski’s richly detailed interpretations of them. I take his word here for his interpretations of Hartshorne’s ideas; my discussion is not pointed in that direction. I offer my comments in the spirit of encouraging further inquiry into three important issues posed by Dombrowski’s book. These issues do not bear directly on Hartshorne’s aesthetic theories or philosophy of art narrowly conceived. But they come prominently into view in the course of Dombrowski’s exposition of aspects of Hartshorne’s metaphysics and especially his philosophical theology, intimately related as he shows these two areas to be to Hartshorne’s ruminations on the character and scope of aesthetic experience. The three issues I shall discuss are Hartshorne’s classification of emergentism as simply a version of mind-body dualism; the implication

Approaches to Religious Differences

Two closely related questions are often of great importance to college and university students. How is one to reconcile ones particular form of religious commitment with the fact of so many alternative paths of religious thought and life? What approach should one take to the plain fact of religious diversity? This essay sketches six possible answers to the two questions and strongly recommends one of them. It also describes some of the authors assumptions about the nature, scope, and significance of religion in general and shows how these assumptions influence his recommendation.

The Decline of the Secular University

The basic thesis of this provocative and important book is twofold. On the one hand, it is that colleges and universities should not just teach about religion but should also allow distinctive religious perspectives and arguments to be a significant part of academic curricula and of discussions about educational outlooks, meanings, and values in academic communities. On the other hand, the authors thesis is that secularism should not just be assumed as the underlying and pervasive outlook of colleges and universities, but that secularism itself should be taught about, just as religion is now taught about (e.g., in religious studies programs or history courses), in order critically to identify and analyze secularisms own basic assumptions about the nature of reality and the character of responsible human life in the world. Failure in this task means that students are simply being indoctrinated into secularist views without being given opportunity clearly to recognize them as such or to bring them under critical scrutiny.

Naturism as a Form of Religious Naturalism

The version of religious naturalism sketched here is called naturism to distinguish it from conceptions of religious naturalism that make fundamental appeal to some idea of deity, deities, or the divine, however immanental, functional, nonontological, or purely valuational or existential such notions may be claimed to be. The focus of naturism is on nature itself as both metaphysically and religiously ultimate. Nature is sacred in its own right, not because of its derivation from some more-ultimate religious principle, state, being, beings, or order of being. Humans, their cultures, and their histories are conceived as integra parts of nature, manifestations of potentialities that lie within it and have been actualized by biological evolution. While there is no purpose of nature, the natural order contains beings capable of purposive behavior. With this purposive behavior, and the goals and ideals implicit in it, humans have the capacity to give significant direction to their ongoing cultural evolution and to discover and maintain their appropriate place within the community of creatures.