Thomas Buford
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Thomas O. Buford (1932-) holds the Louis G. Forgione Chair of Philosophy at Furman University and has been an adherent of the Boston Personalism branch of philosophy.
[edit] Academic career
Buford joined the faculty at Furman University in 1969. After earning the Bachelor of Arts at the University of North Texas in 1955 and the Bachelor of Divinity at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1958, he received his Doctorate of Philosophy at Boston University in 1963, where he studied under Peter Anthony Bertocci (1910-1989), who had studied under Edgar Sheffield Brightman (1884-1954), who had studied under Borden Parker Bowne (1847-1910). Bowne, a friend of the philosopher William James, founded the Boston Personalist tradition in philosophy.
[edit] Personalism
Personalism has been described as "a philosophical perspective for which the person is the ontological ultimate and for which personality is the fundamental explanatory principle," and as "most fundamentally . . . a philosophy committed to the primacy of person-al (subject-related) categories of value and meaning, to the mutual respect of all beings in a reality experienced as a community of persons who are convinced that subject-related categories are subjectival, not subjective in the sense of being private and arbitrary." For personalists, in short, the world of persons is the starting point and end of all philosophy. For awhile, Boston Personalism played a major role in American thought. Martin Luther King, Jr., for example, writes in his book Stride Toward Freedom (1958) that the personal idealism of his teachers at Boston University "remains today my basic philosophic position," giving him, among other things, a "metaphysical basis for the dignity and worth of all human personality." In working to ground personalism, Bowne was influenced especially by Kant. As Bowne's first main successor, Brightman put Hegel in the place where Bowne had put Kant in personalist philosophy. Bertocci leaned perhaps most heavily on clinical psychotheory, and Buford draws particularly on the thought of the Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668-1744).
[edit] Works
In addition to editing three collections and coediting two---most recently Personalism Revisted---Buford has authored four books, perhaps the most notable of which is In Search of a Calling (1995). He also founded the academic journal The Personalist Forum---whose name was derived from the titles of two journals formerly devoted to personalist discussion, The Personalist and The Philosophical Forum---and a philosophical organization called the International Forum on Persons.
