Abstract

Throughout his philosophical career DeWitt H. Parker was concerned both with the analysis of given experience to provide the metaphysical categories and with the formulation of a cosmological scheme based on these categories. He published two extensive works on metaphysics: The Self and Nature and Experience and Substance. Yet he was preoccupied with no area of given experience more than with value experience, as is evident from the titles of his books: The Principles of Aesthetics, The Analysis of Art, and Human Values. In his intellectual autobiography Parker confessed that this interest in "the general nature, classification, and criticism of Values" came as "a result doubtless of ethical problems raised by the Great War." On two occasions at least Parker promised in print to write a volume on the metaphysics of value. Unfortunately he never did so, although at the time of his death he was at work on such a volume. Professor William K. Frankena of the University of Michigan, omitting the introductory chapter and reducing other references to the metaphysics of value, has edited this manuscript and published it as The Philosophy of Value, the title Parker himself had chosen.