George Allan is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Dickinson College. He is the author of many books, including The Importances of the Past: A Meditation on the Authority of Tradition; The Realizations of the Future: An Inquiry into the Authority of Praxis; The Patterns of the Present: Interpreting the Authority of Form; and Higher Education in the Making: Pragmatism, Whitehead, and the Canon, all also published by SUNY Press.