Persons, Institutions, and Trust: Persons, Institutions, and Trust

James McLachlan

Des. 2017 · Vernon Press

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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.  

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James McLachlan is Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Western Carolina University. He the author of several books and articles on Personalism and the problem of evil including: “The Desire to be God: Freedom and the Other in Sartre and Berdyaev”; and most recently, the articles: “Mormonism and the Problem of Evil”; “Mystic Terror and Metaphysical Rebels: Active Evil and Active Love in Schelling and Dostoevsky”; “Satan: Romantic Hero or Just Another Asshole: The Desire to be God, The Devil, and the Demonic”; “Hell Is Others and Paradise Is Others: Hell in the Existential Paris of Sartre and Berdyaev”; and, “The il y a and the Ungrund: Levinas and the Russian Existentialists Berdyaev and Shestov.” He is co-director of the Levinas Summer Seminar and co-founder and co-organizer of the Personalist Seminar. He has known Thomas Buford since 1990. Tom has mentored him since then and helped him discover he was a personalist.