A Festschrift for Thomas O. Buford

Vernon Press Presents

Persons, Institutions, and Trust

Essays in Honour of Thomas O. Buford

Eds: James M. McLachlan

James Beauregard

Richard Prust

The papers presented in this volume honor Thomas O. Buford. Buford is Professor Emeritus in Philosophy at Furman University where he taught for more than forty years. Several of the papers in this volume are from former students. But Professor Buford is also a pre-eminent voice of fourth generation Personalism, and Boston Personalism in particular. Personalism is a school of philosophical and theological thought which holds that the ideas of “person” and “personality” are indispensable to an adequate understanding of all metaphysical and epistemological problems, as well as are keys to an adequate theory of ethical and political human interaction. Most personalists assert that personality is an irreducible fact found in all existence, as well as in all interpretation of the meaning of existence and the truth about experience. Anything that seems to exist impersonally, such as inanimate matter, nevertheless can exist and have meaning only as related to some personal being. The Boston Personalist tradition was inaugurated by Borden Parker Bowne and continued by Edgar S. Brightman, Peter Bertocci, John Lavely, Carol Robb, and Martin Luther King, Jr. 

Contents
Autobiography
Thomas O. Buford, Emeritus, Furman University

Are Institutions Persons? Buford and the Primacy of Social Order
Randy Auxier, Southern Illinois University Carbondale
Response by Thomas O. Buford

Institutions Supported, Institutions Subverted: Thomas O Buford on the Parables of Jesus
James Beauregard Ph.D, Riviere University
Response by Thomas O. Buford

Why Should I Trust?
Richard Prust, Emeritus, St. Andrews College
Response by Thomas O. Buford

Christianity and Intellectual Seriousness
Mason Marshall, Pepperdine University
Response by Thomas O. Buford

Trusting to Dance Within the Nexus
Nathan Riley, Independent Scholar
Response by Thomas O. Buford

Prayer, Magic, and the Devil
Christopher Williams, University of Nevada-Reno
Response by Thomas O. Buford

Buford, Kohak, and a Renewed Understanding of the Personal Nature of Time
John Scott Grey, Ferris State University
Response by Thomas O. Buford

Death and Self-Importance
John Lachs, Vanderbilt University
Response by Thomas O. Buford

Danish Personalism On Democracy and the Engaged Human Freedom for the Common Good
Jonas Norgaard Mortensen
Response by Thomas O. Buford

On Behalf of Poetasters
Charles Conti, University of Sussex
Response by Thomas O. Buford

Persons, Community and Human Diversity
Eugene Long, Emeritus, University of South Carolina
Response by Thomas O. Buford

Buford as Teacher, Mentor, Person
J. Aaron Simmons, Furman University
Response by Thomas O. Buford

The Personalist Response to the Problem of Evil in Brightman, Bertocci, and Buford
James McLachlan, Western Carolina University
Response by Thomas O. Buford

Fourth Generation Boston University Personalism: The Philosophy of Thomas O. Buford
Randall E. Auxier, Southern Illinois University Carbondale
Response by Thomas O. Buford