The Pluralist

With the completion of this fourth volume, The Pluralist comes to the end of a fruitful affiliation with the Ethics Center of Oklahoma State University. We want to acknowledge and heartily thank OSU for its generous financial and in-kind support over the past four years while we changed and grew. Thanks is also due to Scott Gelfand, director of the Ethics Center at OSU, for his work on the journal. We are turning a page in our history now, and we are grateful to all those who contributed to the most recent chapter.

The present issue features two symposia. The first, on Royce and race, breaks new ground in historical scholarship while contributing also to current discussions on the philosophy of race. In recent years, a number of scholars, including Jacquelyn Kegley, Shannon Sullivan, and Elizabeth Duquette, have gone back to Royce as a source of thinking about race problems that has deep roots in the tradition of American philosophy—what Cornel West called the tradition of Emersonian democratic pluralism. Kegley’s widely cited works on this topic are here taken up and pressed to their next stage, while Tommy Curry and Dwayne Tunstall go a different direction. Curry’s thorough historical research and critical argumentation provides a serious challenge to the prevailing interpretations of Royce on race. All future scholars in this area will be obliged to confront his case.

Also included herein is a symposium on creativity and novelty. This discussion began in an earlier number of The Pluralist, when Pete Gunter reviewed Don Crosby’s book Novelty.¹ The review, among other factors, prompted new work from Crosby, and these brought new responses from Gunter and Steve Bickham. In many ways, the issues of creativity and novelty lie at the metaphysical heart of pluralism.

We are pleased to bring you these two symposia along with the fine [End Page v] articles by Lingis, Fritzman and Riley, and McDonald. We believe that our readers will find this issue of The Pluralist stimulating and informative.