From Process Studies, 27:1-2, Spring and Summer, 1998, 7-17.  I have merely formatted the text found on Religion-online. 

I would be grateful to the visitor who owns a copy of this issue of Process Studies and would be willing to scan the photo Lucas refers to and send it to me, so that I may use it to illustrate the many pages that are devoted to Ford on this site.

For that matter, I would be grateful to receive any digital image of Ford for that purpose.

Anthony Flood

June 4, 2009

 

 

Lewis S. Ford: A Life in Process

George R. Lucas, Jr.

1. A Personal and Affectionate Portrait of Lewis S. Ford

Process philosophy in the United States—indeed, in the world—today is unimaginable apart from the enduring contributions of Lewis S. Ford.  The picture that I chose to illustrate this special issue came from a portfolio of photos that I shamelessly tricked Lewis into providing; I chose this particular portrait because it speaks volumes about the man and his work.  The portrait captures a pose familiar to generations of process philosophers who have liter-ally sat across the table from Lewis at conferences, symposia, or in classes where Whitehead (or, about as often, at which Ford’s own interpretive develop-ment of Whitehead’s thought) was the topic of discussion.  This photograph vividly portrays Ford’s seriousness of purpose, including stern attention to intricacies of argument and to the nuance of textual details, and most of all captures the total concen-tration of intellectual energy and engagement with which Lewis Ford has unfailingly, throughout a long and distinguished career, approached the life of philosophical reflection.

There is in this photograph also more than a hint of what most of us—his colleagues, students, and friends—discovered in our dealings with Lewis himself: that he was a formidable force to be dealt with, unyielding and uncompromising in his devotion to Whitehead, to Hartshorne, and to his own considered interpretations of central process doc-trines.  My own first encounter with Ford is instinctive, inasmuch as I have heard variations on my own experience related by so many others in our field.

Having spent several years in the study of Whitehead’s thought in seminary and later in graduate philosophy seminars, I had finally worked out a position on the validity of Hartshorne’s ontological argument that related that argument back to the more empirical, experiential, and descriptive theism of Whitehead.  The connection (and, I thought, the completion) of the process version of the ontological argument required a complicated detour through Hegel.  At that time (the mid-1970s) this was not a detour that many process philosophers were willing to make.  I wrote out my argument, vetted it through my graduate faculty, and sent the resulting amended version of a paper called “Organism and Teleology” on to the newly founded journal, Process Studies.  About three weeks later I received a detailed reply (four pages of typed, single-spaced commentary) from the founding editor of that journal.  Ford took issue with every aspect of my approach to Whitehead and Hartshorne, and dearly indicated that he found the avenue to process theism through Hegel to be an unpromising route indeed!  I was furious at this rejection (as I later told him) because it seemed that the objection was one of principle rather than of fact or interpretation, and so was unanswerable: there could be, Ford thought, no demonstrable connection between Whitehead (and Hartshorne) and Hegel.

That position seemed to me so unreasonable and stubborn that I set out to prove him wrong.  The result became my doctoral dissertation at Northwestern University (later published by Scholar’s Press in the AAR Dissertation Series as Two Views of Freedom in Process Thought: A Study of Hegel and Whitehead).  Lewis, whose intractability had effectively blocked the publication of my article, became a mentor in the project, and introduced me to George Kline at Bryn Mawr, who had already attempted to make these connections in several articles.  The dissertation could not have been written without their enormous help—Kline encour-aging and suggestive, and Ford (if the reader can imagine that serious countenance in the portrait shaking slowly, negatively, from side to side) resisting every move I made.  An article became a book, and the two major modern figures of neo-Aristotelian metaphysics were brought into dialogue, all on account of Ford’s intransigence . . . and his kind (if militantly skeptical) assistance.  I flatter myself that I may have convinced him in the end, but I’m not entirely sure!  From what I gather, many another graduate student’s dissertation came to fruition via a similar route!

In certain respects, this portrait of Lewis is also reminiscent of Paul Tillich (sans eyeglasses), a similarly formidable, uncompromising, difficult, and highly original thinker.  In light of Lewis’s long and distinguished career, encompassing so many contributions to process philosophy, many readers may have forgotten that Ford began his intellectual career as a Tillichian, writing his dissertation at Yale over thirty-five years ago on “The Ontological Foundation of Paul Tillich’s Theory of Religious Symbol,” and publishing his first several scholarly articles in the early 1960s in distinguished journals like the Journal of the History of Philosophy and the Journal of Religion on aspects of Tillich’s thought. Lewis himself once commented that, at the time he first encountered Hartshorne’s thought (as a senior undergraduate at Yale), he was a convinced Tillichian, and thought it would be possible simply to incorporate Hartshorne’s conception of divine knowledge within a Tillichian framework.  Subsequent graduate study, culminating in the aforementioned dissertation, convinced Lewis that this synthesis could not be accomplished.  Hartshorne made sense to Lewis only against the backdrop of Whitehead, and he found himself increasingly led to the inescapable disjunction: Whitehead or Tillich.  History records for us Lewis’s subsequent choice between these diverging paths in his philosophical forest.  Robert Frost was right, that choice has made all the difference, and we who count ourselves among Lewis’s friends and colleagues have been the beneficiaries.

I mentioned the shameless ruse by which I came by this photo, and it, too, is revelatory.  I wrote to Lewis outlining a plan I had formulated to write a book devoting one chapter to each of the major figures in process philosophy since Hartshorne—makers of modern process thought, if you will—to include the work of Sherburne, Christian, Leclerc, Cobb, Kline, Neville, Allan, Nobo and perhaps others. I proposed a short biographical sketch with photo for each, followed by a critical summary and commentary on their contributions.  I asked if I could make Lewis the “demonstration chapter,” for the purposes of compiling a publication prospectus, and requested his photo.  He fell for it, but with a typically Fordian twist: while sending the photo and voluminous suggestions for how to go about composing the chapter on his own work, he modestly demurred, arguing that William Christian should be the featured figure.  While never shy about the importance of his own interpretations, he has always been extraordinarily modest in subordinating his own work to that of others, especially colleagues like John Cobb, and teachers like William Christian, to whom he proclaims unfailingly his allegiance and intellectual indebtedness.

 

II. A Brief Intellectual Biography

Lewis Ford was born in Leonia, New Jersey on November 18, 1933.  He attended the prestigious Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts on full scholarship, from which he was graduated in 1951. He attended Yale College, majoring in philosophy, and received his Bachelor of Arts, magna cum laude, in 1955.  He traveled in Germany during the following year, attending lectures at Muenster, subsequently returning to the U.S. for a year of study at Emory University.  He returned to Yale to begin his doctoral studies in 1957, and in that same year married the former Anne Lide.  Two daughters (Stephanie Anne and Rachel Lynn) were born while Lewis and Anne lived as graduate students in New Haven.  The aforementioned dissertation on Tillich, supervised by John E. Smith, was completed in 1962, and a Danforth Fellowship afforded Lewis the opportunity of undertaking additional work in biblical studies at Yale Divinity School during the following academic year.

The resulting command of interpretive textual methodologies, especially form criticism, was to prove extremely significant in his subsequent work on the evolution of Whitehead’s thought.  For, as Lewis would later assert in what I consider his greatest book, The Emergence of Whitehead’s Metaphysics (EMW), the problem of reconstructing Whitehead’s intellectual development on the basis only of apparent seams or fractures in his published manuscripts is not unlike the formidable problem faced by biblical scholars seeking to discern the various distinct historical threads of contribution to the final canonical form of a biblical text, absent attribution or direct evidence of multiple authorship. That sojourn at divinity school also contributed to Lewis’s masterful examination, in The Lure of God (LG) of the biblical grounding of, and justification for, many of the otherwise presumably nonclassical, neo-classical, or anti-traditional formulations of theism offered by Whitehead, Hartshorne, and other process philosophers.¹

In a broader vein, those studies and intellectual interests simply did for Lewis Ford what the study of philosophy at Haverford and later Harvard had earlier done for Charles Hartshorne; namely, bringing to philosophically rigorous form the web of beliefs and commitments of religious faith that constituted the heritage of his upbringing. Lewis’s own commentary (in private correspondence) on his intellectual voy-age in this respect is revealing:

Divine foreknowledge and freedom had been an important problem for me, coming from a strict Biblical background, from the Plymouth Brethren (James Luther Adams and Garrison Keillor also have Plymouth Brethren backgrounds; they appear in Keillor’s writings as “Sanctified Brethren”).  They believe in strict inerrancy and in a New Testament church which for them means no ordained clergy. They consider themselves the only Christians (excluding even Baptists), the “little flock” against the world.  My intellectual life has been a gradual emancipation from this mentality, but it taught me how to exist in, and even be proud of being in, a cognitive minority.  I have never been swayed by viewpoints simply because they represented the majority view, or even an influential minority view.  One can persevere in process studies only if one is not impressed with dominant views (analytic philosophy, structuralism, postmodernism). The flip side is that I have not been as sensitive to these dominant movements as I should be. (ca. December, 1997)

Perhaps this passage explains both how, and why, Lewis has been as fearless as he has been inflexible in pursuing his own philosophical path, even in pursuing his own (rather than others’) interpretations of Whitehead and process philosophy.  Most of us, I suspect, are impressed by the power of Whitehead’s intellectual vision, and seek to make it more accessible and intelligible to colleagues in other fields (and to the educated public).  We seek (to borrow a line of thought from Kierkegaard) to make things easier; Lewis always seemed, by contrast, to be determined (like Kierkegaard himself to offer as his contribution to make things harder—or, at least (to be fair) not to soft-peddle or back away from the difficulties that Whitehead’s thought presented. Jorge Luis Nobo, who conceived and edited this magnificent tribute to Ford’s work, is another philo-sopher who possesses this trait of uncompromising intellectual courage in “taking on” the difficulties that Whitehead presents.  Greg Easterbrook’s brief, masterful tribute to Charles Hartshorne in U.S. News and World Report (23 February 1998) similarly credits Hartshorne’s ability to achieve his great philosophical work while standing outside the mainstream of philosophical thought, and swimming against the tide of intellectual fashion.

Leaving Yale, Ford taught philosophy during the 1960s first at MacMurray College (Jacksonville, IL), and then at the experimental Raymond College at the University of the Pacific (Stockton, CA).  From 1970-1973, he taught in the philosophy department at Penn State, won a prestigious NEH Fellowship, and in 1974 became a full professor at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, where he taught until retirement in 1996.

It was in the late 1960s that Ford initiated a collaboration that was to prove fateful for the future of process philosophy in this country.  He spent a sabbatical at Claremont, and arranged what he describes as “a weekly tutorial” with John Cobb. Ford, who portrays himself modestly as the student in these encounters, would set the agenda for each meeting, and the two would discuss issues of interpretation.  Ford described himself during these meetings as invariably wedded to some single “correct” or self-evident interpretation of a line of Whitehead’s text, whereupon John would gently, dialectically, raise questions about possible alternatives that, as Ford would subsequently admit, seemed more in keeping with interpretations of other passages to which Ford himself had, in preceding weeks, assented.  Of these meetings Ford comments:

It was without doubt the richest learning experience I ever had; it was also a kind of intellectual psychoanalysis.  Cobb was always very polite; I felt like a barbarian in his presence.  But on the key point each of us maintained our positions.  He defended the Consequent Nature of God, which called for five revisions of Whitehead, mostly in the direction of Hartshorne, while I argued we should stick as closely to Whitehead as possible.

These meetings had two profound consequences.  One was the eventual collaboration between Cobb (and the staff of the newly created Center for Process Studies at Claremont) and Ford (back East on what Marjorie Suchocki later jokingly dubbed “the periphery” of process studies!) in the publication of a new journal, Process Studies, inaugurated in 1971. Ford was to serve for over twenty-five years as its editor, succeeded (upon his retirement from Old Dominion) by the present editor, Professor Barry Whitney.  It is beyond anyone’s estimation how much the Center and this journal have done to foster and encourage the study of process thought in this country and abroad.

The second consequence of this fateful meeting of two great minds is much more subtle, though no less profound in its implications for the future of process philosophy.  As Ford’s final sentence in the quotation above reveals, this was the beginning of an intellectual process that concluded some three decades later (as I argue in my Hartshorne Centennial address, “Charles Hartshorne: The Last or the First?” [CHLF]): the gradual disassociation or untangling of Whitehead’s version of process philosophy from Hartshorne’s idealistic philosophical theology.  It is clear from Ford’s own account that it was very difficult in those years to distinguish between Whitehead and Hartshorne.  The masthead of Process Studies in those early years essentially defined process philosophy as a school of philoso-phical thought extending from Whitehead primarily (though, the journal was careful to state, not exclusively) to Hartshorne and his followers. Cobb, at that time, used to say that from Hartshorne’s lectures it was very difficult to see where Whitehead left off and Hartshorne began.

But the differences were increasingly apparent to both participants in these seminars in the late 1960s. Ladd Sessions, in the meantime, wrote an interesting and important article, based on his study of Hartshorne’s doctoral dissertation, on the differences between Whitehead’s and Hartshorne’s thought. Ford, to whom this piece was later submitted for publication in the new journal, found Session’s conclusions surprising and frustrating, because that early Hartshorne work appeared to have all the essentials of Hartshorne’s later philosophy in place, but without evidence of any direct influence of Whitehead.²  David Griffin, then a new Assistant Professor at Claremont, put together a very valuable compendium of all the differences that Hartshorne had discerned between his own thought and Whitehead’s.  Ford then tried to develop a perspec-tive on these differences, and found himself on most points of divergence increasingly drawn to Whitehead’s original perspective, rather than to Hartshorne’s modifications.  The result was process philosophy’s counterpart to Hegel’s famous Differenschrift: Ford’s first major (edited) book publication, Two Process Philosophers: Hartshorne’s Encounter with Whitehead (TPP).

This discovery, and this unraveling or disentangling of two important figures whose thought is still stubbornly and inextricably linked in the minds of most philosophers, is important for a number of reasons.  The appreciation of Hartshorne’s originality has (as I argue in CHLF) been somewhat obscured or upstaged by his own decision, early in his career, to interpret his own thought in such close dialogue with Whitehead’s.  Hartshorne’s increasing willingness subsequently in his career to acknowledge his indebtedness to C. S. Peirce in particular, and to a host of other important historical antecedents (especially to Josiah Royce and to a number of personal idealists), helped broaden the discussion of what process thought metaphysically (as well as historically) entails.  This is nicely illustrated in Nicholas Rescher’s new treatment of process metaphysics (Process Metaphysics), where Hegel is accorded at least honorable mention if not pride of historical place, and Peirce is credited even more highly than Whitehead with contributing to important alternative doctrines of process (as opposed to substance) metaphysics.

This dissociation liberated Whitehead’s thought as well.  In particular, as the late Victor Lowe patiently and quietly maintained throughout his lifetime—and as Donald Sherburne has forcefully and convincingly demonstrated in his many writings—theism was not an essential component of Whitehead’s thought, and the viability of process metaphysics does not stand or fall on the issue of theism alone (as the vast majority of process philosophers and opponents of process philosophy and its brands of philosophical theism stubbornly continue to maintain).

If all these diverse claims can be swallowed by the devoted process reader without she or he choking with apoplexy, one further, monumental implication can be drawn, and Ford has drawn it. From the privileged perspective of hindsight on Ford’s own subsequent work following Two Process Philosophers, the implications of this differenz (zwischen Whitehead and Hartshorne) can be seen to have set an intellectual agenda that continues to unfold to the present day.  Let me try to state this thesis clearly.

Hartshorne represents one path, largely influenced by the (now virtually lost) traditions of pluralistic, personal idealism, of extending and developing Whitehead’s own modest, philosophically formal, neo-Aristotelian discussions of theism in Science and the Modern World, Religion in the Making, and Process and Reality.  The process Differenzschrift set Ford upon a second odyssey: the refocusing of process philosophers on the original thought of Whitehead himself, unredacted through the lens of Hartshorne’s prior personal idealism and philoso-phical theism.  No one but Lewis Ford possessed the requisite understanding, the confluence of intellectual talents, and most of all, the patience, to attempt the painstaking deconstruction and recon-struction of the pattern of authorship of Whitehead’s major work, leading to theories about the evolution of his thought, almost entirely in the absence of the archival documentation (the Nachlass) usually required for such a reconstruction.  At first, Lewis apparently conceived his project as the attempt to construct a full-blown natural theology for Whitehead’s metaphysics that would complement the cosmology of Process and Reality.  This, coinci-dentally, would remove a major criticism leveled against Whitehead: that his is essentially a descriptive rather than an explanatory metaphysics, adducing principles that apply (in contemporary modal jargon) to this actual, rather than generally to any possible, world.  Just as Process and Reality discusses the world, bringing in God insofar as God is necessary to account for (this) world, Ford sought at first to discuss God more generally, bringing in (this) world only insofar as it was necessary to account for God.

This grand vision in turn required not only that Whitehead’s original line of thought, unredacted by Hartshorne, Christian, Leclerc and Cobb, be recovered (a task Lewis shared with Jorge Nobo), but also that the problems that Whitehead faced, as Whitehead envisioned them, and his various at-tempts at solution (ending presumably in the views published and taken by most of us as the last word on the subject) be likewise exposed and rethought.  The ways in which this task could be carried out, and the interesting metaphysical revisions and alternatives to which it would lead regarding the central doctrines of process metaphysics, has constituted an inter-esting discussion and dialectical tension between Ford and Nobo over the years, to which many of the rest of us have attended with the greatest interest.

Nobo has played the role of the biblical literalist in these debates, adopting a holistic perspective that requires that every element of the extant text be taken seriously.  Often this has led to a re-examination of largely forgotten, overlooked, or reinterpreted doctrines in Whitehead’s writings, with Nobo demanding (like the authors of Deuteronomy) a recovery and return to the original form, simultane-ously holding all resulting aspects of Whitehead’s views together at once, without loss or revision of any part (for example, the original two-part theory of transition and concrescence, leading to a recovery of the power of the causal efficacy of the past).  Ford, by contrast, has focused on a genetic analysis, similar in impact to the introduction of German “higher criticism,” in which we are to recognize early or preliminary formulations, superseded by later revisions and insertions in the text; forcing choices among alternative and incompatible doctrines, and producing a theory of Whitehead’s own historical development of his “final” ideas or positions (in which, for example, concrescence gradually supersedes transition, and the power of causal efficacy is reduced to the status of the past as material cause, with the future or “final” cause dominating the process of concrescence).

I have retraced and reviewed these conversa-tions, and attempted to assess their contribution to our contemporary understanding of process metaphysics, in a number of other works (e.g., The Rehabilitation of Whitehead, “The Compositional History of Whitehead’s Writings,” “Outside the Camp: Recent Work in Whitehead’s Philosophy”), which help contextualize historically the many contributions Ford has made in over 100 scholarly articles published during the past three decades. Suffice it to say that the results of Ford’s (and of Nobo’s) close textual work on Whitehead’s writings have yielded surprising insights and important dividends, for which we are indebted to both. Were that the end of the story, it would be more than enough for one scholarly career and professional lifetime.

My central point now is that it is only in light of this theory of Whitehead’s own intellectual project that one could do what Lewis has now proposed doing: show its completion or fulfillment in his own theory of God as the subjectivity of the future, a profoundly difficult and complex notion discussed at greater length in other essays by George Allan and Robert C. Neville in this Special Focus. The earlier proposal for a complementary natural theology presupposed that Ford would be able to show how divine temporal valuation contributes to the provision of initial aims for concrete occasions. Lewis writes (EWM 9) that Whitehead’s admission that he could not himself account for how the Consequent Nature of God could be prehended came as a shock. As a result, Ford suggests that he became increa-singly dissatisfied with his own early attempt to solve this problem in his seminal essay, “The Nontem-porality of Whitehead’s God.”³

It was at this same time that Ford describes how he became intrigued by Wolfhart Pannenberg’s definition of God as the power of the future, operative in the present. Pannenberg himself never elaborated upon this suggestively ambiguous hypothesis. Ford commented briefly on this idea in The Lure of God, but a decisive shift occurred subsequently when he began to wonder how we can intelligibly speak of “the influence” of the Consequent Nature if it cannot be prehended. In answer, Ford began to concep-tualize the notion of a divine universal future creativity which is somehow pluralized in present actual occasions. This proposed transformation of the conventional understanding of how the Consequent Nature functions began to carry Ford in a direction that led him away from the modifications of Whitehead on this issues as proposed by Hartshorne and Cobb.  Ford began to develop this line of thought in the early 1980s, coincident with the completion of the first major phase of his textual study of Whitehead, and has emphasized this direction increasingly since that time.⁴

 

III. Concluding Unscientific Postscript

At this writing [1998], Ford is still engaged in the project of trying to render this novel conception of natural theology intelligible.  Short articles, of which he has published a large number, are not the proper venue for developing a thesis of this complexity.  His views are worked out at length in a forthcoming, and quite lengthy, manuscript: The Divine Activity of the Future, soon to appear from the State University of New York Press in the Philosophy Series. [It appeared as Transforming Process Theism, SUNY Series in Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000.]  The intricate nature of that thesis continues to demonstrate how closely Ford’s own development of philosophical theism is tied to his meticulous textual studies of the development (and, of his perceptions of the ultimate failures or frustrating dead ends) of Whitehead’s own efforts to formulate a natural theology consonant with his cosmological views.  In The Emergence of White-head’s Metaphysics, for example, Ford determined that some of Whitehead’s editorial “insertions” after delivering, but just prior to publishing, his lectures produced considerable alterations in the original positions sketched.  The classic example is the insertion of the “Epochal Theory of Time” in Science and the Modern World, forcing the eventual transformation of what, in that book, had initially been a Spinozistic approach to creativity as the one, undifferentiated underlying activity (with “events” of varied temporal duration as the “modes” of this underlying process) toward the Leibnizian monado-logy of actual entities (each a kind of time-quantum) that finally appeared subsequently in Process and Reality.  There are many more examples of this technique which Ford has not yet published, largely insertions in Process and Reality (and also Religion in the Making).  Some of these pertain, Ford writes, to Whitehead’s concept of God, showing that Whitehead experimented, at different points in the text of that work, with at least three distinct notions of God: (a) as wholly nontemporal and nonconcrescent; (b) as nontemporal and concrescent; and the view that we take as canonical, of God as (c) both temporal and concrescent.⁵

Another book in progress, tentatively entitled The Texture of Process Theism, approaches the problem from a different angle.  Through collecting and reworking many of his previously published articles, Ford will attempt in this new book to formulate the requisite complementary natural theology for Whitehead’s cosmology in historical conversation with, and in dialectical opposition to, a number of contrasting perspectives on creativity, temporality, immutability, theodicy, and technical (internal) prob-lems in process metaphysics put forth by Robert Neville, Norris Clarke, Donald Sherburne, and other colleagues over the years.

What this substantial, ongoing, determinedly creative activity on the part of its author reveals is this: despite the appearance of formidable immu-tability that the photograph I originally chose seems to portray, the reality of Lewis Ford is something else entirely—the reality of process itself.  For this philosopher and his work represent stability precisely through sustained growth, development, and modification—occasionally surprising us with novelty and change.  This is not merely a philosopher who, after a long career, still represents a work in progress (for that alone is true, by definition, of most of us).  What we discover in Lewis Ford, in addition, is a mind that approaches philosophical problems in a manner quite analogous to the way that he himself depicts God (following Pannenberg) as interacting with and complementing the world the power of the future, operant in the present, effecting a slow but certain transformation and redemption of the past.

 

References

Lewis S. Ford

EMW Lewis S. Ford, The Emergence of Whitehead’s Metaphysics, 1925-1929. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1984.

LG Lewis S. Ford, The Lure of God: The Biblical Background of Process Philosophy. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1976.

TPP Lewis S. Ford, editor, Two Process Philosophers: Hartshorne’s Encounter with Whitehead. Tallahassee, FL: American Academy of Religion, 1973.

 

Other References

CAWW George R. Lucas, Jr.. “The Compositional History of Whitehead’s Writings,” International Philosophical Quarterly 24 (1984), 313-325.

CHLF George R. Lucas, Jr., “Charles Hartshorne: The Last or the First?” Keynote address for the University of Texas Conference in Honor of the Centennial Birthday of Charles Hartshorne, The Personalist Forum (forthcoming, 1998).

RW George R. Lucas, Jr., The Rehabilitation of Whitehead. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989.

OTC George R. Lucas, Jr., “Outside the Camp: Recent Work in Whitehead’s Philosophy, Parts I/II,” Transactions of the C. S. Peirce Society 21/1 (1985), 49 -75; and 21/3 (1985), 327- 382.

PM Nicholas Rescher, Process Metaphysics. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996.

 

Notes

¹ The importance of this book is discussed in depth in Robert C. Neville’s contribution to this Special Focus on Ford’s work.

² I discuss that anomaly at greater length in CHLF.

³International Philosophical Quarterly, 13 (1973), 347- 376.

⁴ See “The Divine Activity of the Future,” Process Studies 11 (1981), 69-79; “Creativity in a Future Key,” in New Essays in Metaphysics, edited by Robert C. Neville (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1986), 179-198. Earlier versions of this position were published in Encounter 41 (1980), 287-292; and in the inaugural volume of the (now defunct) Santa Clara University Journal, Logos 1 (1980), 45-52.

⁵ See the preliminary sketch of these views in Ford’s essay, “The Riddle of Religion in the Making,” Process Studies 22 (1993), 42-50.

Ford Page