Ebook: Logic, God and Metaphysics

The papers in this volume are in honor of Bowman L. Clarke. Bowman Clarke earned degrees from Millsaps College, the University of Mississippi, and Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, including the PhD in philosophy from Emory in 1961. He spent most of his academic career, a total of twenty-nine years, as a member of the Philosophy Department of the University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, from which he retired in 1990. He also served as Head of the Department for several years. He has held many positions of distinction in professional societies, including President of the Georgia Philosophical Society, President of the Society for the Philosophy of Religion, and President of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology. He also served as Editor-in­ Chief of the International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion from 1975-1989. Professor Clarke is the author of Language and Natural Theology (The Hague: Mouton and Co. , 1966) as well as numerous articles in professional journals. He has made major contributions in the areas of the philosophy of religion, the study of the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, and the development of the calculus of individuals. ix J. F. Harris (ed. ), Logic, God and Metaphysics, ix. © 1992 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Introduction The title for this volume, Logic, God, and Metaphysics, was chosen very carefully and deliberately. The papers in this volume are directed at the issues and problems which lie in the domain of the juncture of these three different areas of philosophical inquiry.

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The title of this volume -- Logic, God and Metaphysics -- is carefully chosen and, at the same time, descriptive of its main focus. In the twentieth century, the interests of most philosophers and theologians have fallen into only one of the three areas indicated -- logic, god or metaphysics. Since much of Anglo-American philosophy in this century has been analytic and antimetaphysical because of the influence of positivism, there have been few attempts at continuing metaphysical inquiry. In the early part of the century, the logical atomists combined logic and metaphysics by arguing that the structure of reality is mirrored isomorphically in the structure of a formal, logically perfect, truth-functional language, but their effort was short-lived. Alfred North Whitehead and process philosophers have focused upon god and metaphysics but usually by adopting terminology and distinctions which are unique to certain systems -- making rigorous, logical analysis difficult or impossible.
The papers included in this volume are illustrative of the application of careful, rigorous logical analysis (and sometimes logical systems) to do critical philosophy of religion and what has been called constructive metaphysics.