The Patterns of the Present: Interpreting the Authority of Form

George Allan

nov 2001 · State University of New York Press

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The third volume in a trilogy by George Allan, The Patterns of the Present argues that organisms, persons, and cultures are all meaningful systems, and that the ontological conditions necessary for their sustained systemic unity provide a normative standard—ideals of virtue and responsibility—by which individuals can judge how best to live their lives and seek a common good. Allan, whose views are influenced by his distinctive interpretations of Plato, Kant, Whitehead, and Pragmatism, argues that values can be justified as objective conditions for belief and action without making an appeal to something beyond time and history.

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George Allan is Professor of Philosophy at Dickinson College and Past President of the Metaphysical Society of America. Author of the other books in the trilogy, The Importances of the Past: A Meditation on the Authority of Tradition, The Realizations of the Future: An Inquiry into the Authority of Praxis, both published by SUNY Press, he has also most recently written Rethinking College Education, finalist for the 1999 Ness Prize, Association of American Colleges and Universities.