Advanced search Subscribe to our newsletter and you'll continuously be informed about our new books, series and journals. You can customize this e-mail newsletter to your particular needs and interests. Newsletters include special discount codes. To subscribe or change existing preferences press the subscribe button	Dialogues on Values and Centers of Value. Old Friends, New Thoughts. DICKEN, Thomas M. and Rem B. EDWARDS Amsterdam/New York, NY, 2001, XVI, 318 pp. Pb: 978-90-420-1397-1 / 90-420-1397-4 € 60 / US$ 81 Series: Value Inquiry Book Series 114 This book features two old philosophical friends engaged in lively personal and intellectual conversations. Wary of any dogmatism, their dialogues explore the Big Bang and the joy of grandchildren, value theory and terrorism, God and art, metaphor and meaning, while assessing the thought of Robert S. Hartman, Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, H. Richard Niebuhr, and others. Contents: Rem B. EDWARDS: Editorial Foreword ONE Renewing Friendships TWO God, the World, and Skepticism THREE Bodies, Minds, Memories, and Doubt FOUR Spacey Minds, Metaphors, and Myths FIVE Violence and Hartmanian Axiology SIX Individuals as Intrinsic or Infinite Values SEVEN Measuring Values in Three Dimensions EIGHT Axiology and Religion NINE Spiritual Development, Axiology, and Aesthetics Works Cited About the Authors Index ABOUT THE AUTHORS THOMAS M. DICKEN received his A.B. degree cum laude from the University of Louisville in 1956, a Master of Divinity degree from Yale University Divinity School in 1959, and a Ph.D. degree in Religious Studies from Yale University Graduate School in 1964. From 1964 to 1983, he taught at Rocky Mountain College in Billings, Montana. He was Senior Minister of University Congregational United Church of Christ in Missoula, Montana from 1983 to 1986. He was Senior Minister of First Congregational United Church of Christ in Eau Claire, Wisconsin from 1986 to 1989. From 1989 to 1997, he was Senior Minister of Plymouth Congregational United Church of Christ in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Dicken was a Visiting Scholar at Cambridge University (England) in 1971 and again in 1994. He was a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Study Scholar at Calvin College in 1974. He was a National Endowment for the Humanities Post-Doctoral Fellow at Yale University in 1977-1978. His interests include the philosophy of religion, the history of art, aesthetics, the mind-body problem, value theory, contemporary fiction, and the ontological significance of baseball. He retired in 1997 and lives in Versailles, Kentucky with his wife Nancy. They have four children and a growing number of grandchildren. He has published scholarly articles in many journals, including: 1. “Writing and Perishing: Reflections on Time and the Conservation of Value in Twentieth-Century Literature,” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 83:2 (Summer 2000), pp. 301–323. 2. “The Widow’s Gift,” No Other Foundation, 9:1 (Summer 1988), pp. 15– 7. 3. “The Mark of a Christian,” Faith at Work, 92:4 (May/June 1979), pp. 35–37. 4. “The Shock of Recognition,” Faith at Work, 90:5 (August 1977), pp. 14–27. 5. “Graceful Uselessness,” The Circuit Rider, 1:8 (June 1977), pp. 3–4. 6. “What Does Justice Have to Do with Law?” Judicature: Journal of the American Judicature Society, 58:7 (February 1975), pp. 316–317. 7. “Bonhoeffer’s Legacy and Transactional Analysis,” The Iliff Review, 30:2 (Spring 1973), pp. 15–21. 8. “God and Matter: An Inquiry Into the Nature of God’s Action in the Physical Universe,” The Iliff Review, 27:1 (Winter 1970), pp. 13–25. 9. “Process Philosophy and the Real Presence,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies, 6:1 (Winter 1969), pp. 68–75. 10. “Man, Sport and Existence,” Christian Advocate, 13:15 (24 July 1969), pp. 13–14. 11. “The Biblical Picture of Jesus as the Christ in Tillich’s Theology,” The Journal of Religious Thought, 25:1 (1968-1969), pp. 27–41. 12. “The Prospero Theme in Contemporary Theology: The City as a Theological Norm,” Rocky Mountain Review, 5:2 (1968), pp. 39–48. 13. “Toward a Theology of Evangelism,” Christian Advocate, 11:14 (27 July 1967), pp. 7–8. REM B. EDWARDS received his A.B. degree from Emory University in 1956, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. During graduate school he was a Danforth Graduate Fellow. He received a B.D. degree from Yale University Divinity School in 1959 and a Ph.D. from Emory University in 1962. He taught for four years at Jacksonville University in Florida, moved from there to the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in 1966, and retired from there partly in 1997 and partly in 1998. He continues to be professionally active and kept an office on the University campus until the end of May, 2000. He was a U.T. Chancellor’s Research Scholar in 1985 and a Lindsay Young Professor from 1987 to 1998. His areas of specialization are Philosophy of Religion, American Philosophy, Ethical Theory, Medical Ethics with a special interest in Mental Health Care, Ethics and Animals, and Formal Axiology. He is the author or editor of sixteen books, including Reason and Religion (New York: Harcourt, 1972 and Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1979); Pleasures and Pains: A Theory of Qualitative Hedonism (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1979); with Glenn Graber, BioEthics (San Diego: Harcourt, 1988); with John W. Davis, Forms of Value and Valuation: Theory and Applications (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1991); Formal Axiology and Its Critics (Amsterdam-Atlanta: Editions Rodopi, 1995); Violence, Neglect, and the Elderly, co-edited with Roy Cebik, Glenn Graber, and Frank H. Marsh (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1996); New Essays on Abortion and Bioethics (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1997); Ethics of Psychiatry: Insanity, Rational Autonomy, and Mental Health Care (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1997); Values, Ethics, and Alcoholism, co-edited with Wayne Shelton (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1997); Bioethics for Medical Education, co-edited with Dr. Edward Bittar (Stamford, Conn.: JAI Press, 1999); Religious Values and Valuations (Signal Mountain, Tenn.: Paidia Publishing Co, 2000); and What Caused the Big Bang? (Amsterdam—New York: Editions Rodopi, 2001). Edwards is also the author of over sixty articles and reviews, including “How Process Theology Can Affirm Creation Ex Nihilo,” Process Studies, 29:1 (2000), pp. 77–96. He is an Associate Editor with the Value Inquiry Book Series, published by Editions Rodopi, where he is responsible for the Hartman Institute Axiological Studies special series. For a number of years he was co-editor of the Advances in Bioethics book series published by JAI Press. Edwards has been the President of the Tennessee Philosophical Association (1973-1974), the Society for Philosophy of Religion (1981-1982), and the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology, (1984-1985). He is a Charter Member and Fellow of the Robert S. Hartman Institute for Formal and Applied Axiology, has served on its Board of Directors since 1987, and since 1989 has been its Secretary-Treasurer. He chairs the committee that established and maintains the website for the Robert S. Hartman Institute at: http://www.hartmaninstitute.org EDITORIAL FOREWORD What would you say to explain yourself to a dear, insightful, and philosophical-minded friend who you had not seen or communicated with for over twenty-five years? About which ideas and beliefs that you find yourself taking very seriously after almost a lifetime of serious reflection would you try to communicate? If at some point in getting reacquainted you wanted to converse about formal axiology, how would you go about it? What would you want to know? What would you ask? How would you answer? This book represents the efforts of two close friends, both unique individuals, to respond to such questions, not only for each other, but also for a wide audience. Others would doubtless answer these questions differently, but this book shows how Thomas M. Dicken and Rem B. Edwards have tried thoughtfully to answer them. They hope that the process itself, as well as the contents and results, will be interesting and enlightening to a broad spectrum of other distinctive individuals who want to understand themselves, their unique nature, the meaning of their lives, their locus in reality, their unique worth, what they value, and how they do and should value. While working on Bachelor of Divinity (now called Master of Divinity) degrees at Yale University Divinity School between 1956 and 1959, Edwards and Dicken were very close friends, took many classes together in the Divinity School and the Graduate School of Philosophy, shared numerous priceless experiences, and spent many hours engaged in dialogues on reality, values, knowledge, philosophical theology, and theological philosophy. After what feels like an almost seamless break, these dialogues resume in this book after more than twenty-five years. For a few years after receiving their Yale degrees in 1959, Dicken and Edwards kept up with one another, wrote to one another, and occasionally visited together. Then they drifted apart, geographically and otherwise. Edwards lived successively in Georgia, where he pursued his Ph.D. degree in Philosophy at Emory University, and in Florida where he commenced and Tennessee where he consummated his college teaching career. Dicken lived successively in Connecticut, where he continued at Yale toward a Ph.D. degree in Religious Studies, then in Montana, first as a college teacher and later as a parish minister, then in Wisconsin and Indiana as a parish minister, then most recently in Kentucky after retiring. Both Dicken and Edwards took early retirement in the late 1990s, discovered that they lived only four hours or so apart, and renewed their friendship. The rest is history, much of which is told in this volume. The dialogues on values and centers of value given here range very widely. They cover embodied animal, human, and divine souls as centers of value, metaphors and myths as conveyors of value, God as the ultimate conserver of value, and many permutations, ramifications, and applications of Robert S. Hartman’s formal axiology as a powerful, insightful, and rational way to understand what and how we value. “Centers of value” in the title of the book is broadly construed to encompass both God and human beings as essential metaphysical conditions for the existence and realization of values. These dialogues are conducted with playful seriousness, as a skeptical retired minister confronts a modest and fallibilistic retired philosopher on issues that, to them, really seem to matter at the end of long, productive, and reflective careers. Both authors are too mature (too old?) to waste their time on trivial issues. They are definitely too old to play silly games, but not to play games with ideas that really matter, ideas integral to wisdom. The first chapter of this book introduces readers to Dicken and Edwards as they reacquaint themselves with each other. Readers of philosophy do not usually get to know very well as persons the philosophers they read. Perhaps philosophers should disclose more about themselves than they do. All philosophizing is a view from somewhere, but philosophers (including these authors) usually write as if they don’t exist at all! This volume is a little different in that respect. In their seasoned maturity, Edwards and Dicken are both convinced that philosophizing should be integrated with “having a life.” This volume will give readers some sense of how they do it, and how well they succeed. Disembodied-in-practice readers who do not care about personal lives may just skip Chapter One and begin their reading with Chapter Two, but with the warning that personal elements occasionally creep into the discussions throughout the book. These dialogues were originally transmitted by e-mail to their recipients when “hot off the press.” They were later edited in cooler moments to eliminate as many errors as possible, and to clarify and better explain many things to readers that the authors did not originally have to explain to one another. Short quotations and references in this volume should fall within the realm of “fair use,” but for permission to reprint or paraphrase more detailed copyrighted material, we thank the following: Perseus Books Group: Colin McGinn, The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World, New York: Basic Books. Copyright © 1999 by Colin McGinn. Robert S. Hartman Institute: The writings of Robert S. Hartman. Southern Illinois University Press: Robert S. Hartman, The Structure of Value: Foundations of Scientific Axiology, Carbondale and Edwardsville, 1967. Rem B. Edwards Lindsay Young Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus The University of Tennessee Knoxville, Tennessee EXCERPT (page 84) You astutely discern that although the notion of “having all their properties” applies to us as individual selves, this appears to be trivial because it also applies to everything else, like television sets. Here we must distinguish, I think, between particular television sets with their full spectrum of properties and the class concept “television sets” with only a very limited number of defining properties. I think that Bob Hartman himself was often very confused about the content and application of many of his own brilliant insights; and for years I found these confusions so overwhelming that I was one of his most severe critics, as expressed in some of my earlier publications on formal axiology (Edwards, 1973, 1979a). Eventually, I reached the point where I could see that his brilliant insights could be, and had to be, separated from the confusions, and that what then remains is very appealing and illuminating in many ways. Hartman defines “intrinsic value” as the value of unique individuals; but this requires some analysis. You correctly indicate that in some sense you are a unique individual, and so is your television set; but surely television sets have no intrinsic worth, no matter how instrumentally entertaining and otherwise useful they are! In my article on “Universals, Individuals, and Intrinsic Good,” I wrestle with some of these problems (Edwards, 1991). There I ask whether Hartman’s identification of intrinsic value with unique individuals means that “All intrinsic goods are unique individuals,” or that “All unique individuals are intrinsic goods.” I conclude that it has to be the first. It could not be the second because, as further explained, “uniqueness” alone can’t define intrinsic goodness. Particular television sets and rocks are indeed unique individuals in the sense that they have all their properties; but they are not intrinsic goods. Intrinsic goods, I explain, involve a synthesis of uniqueness with selected repeatable universals like consciousness, a general capacity for valuation, and perhaps many other psychological properties and capacities. With that background, let me return to why treating the self as the sum of its properties is illuminating and should be taken with some seriousness. Hartman’s axiology is a “formal axiology,” which means that he sought for common formal patterns in and among values and valuations. Conceiving of the individual self as the sum total of its properties is admittedly a very abstract form or pattern for selfhood, so abstract that it seems to you and many others to be totally empty. Well, in a way, it is! But this is its virtue, not a vice, for the following reasons. First, the idea that the individual self is the sum total of its properties helps to free us from prejudice and preconceptions. Defining the self as a Cartesian mental substance, or as a Kantian noumenal ego, or as an immortal soul, or as that underlying?something?I?know?not?what to which all my properties belong, or as anything with a specific content as opposed to an abstract form, directs us to try to find that specific content. Despite his own best judgments, even Hartman lapsed with some regularity into Kantianism; and this was one of the greatest problems I had with him while he was alive and for many years after his death (Edwards, 1995a). But if we, like Hume, can’t find the specific content to which a non?formalistic definition directs us, we then lapse into confusion, agnosticism, or skepticism. 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