The Journal of Speculative Philosophy

Some readers will perhaps want to know immediately "what is personalism?" and that question will be answered a bit later in this review, but the first task is to situate this volume in its context, after which the question about its perspective can be answered with greater ease. Personalism Revisited is one of the latest offerings in the Value Inquiry Book Series (VIBS), belonging to the subseries Histories and Addresses of Philosophical Societies (HAPS). Editions Rodopi and the VIBS are doing the philosophical community a great boon by encouraging the leaders of the various philosophical societies to gather and publish their histories before those histories begin to pass away. There has been quite a flurry of similar activity in recent years along these lines, including notably the ongoing publication in book form by Kluwer under the editorship of Richard T. Hull, also the editor of HAPS, of the presidential addresses of all of the divisions of the American Philosophical Association (APA), which has released four volumes as of this date. Hull wrote a foreword and compiled an outstanding index for Personalism Revisited and is by anyone's standards doing yeoman's work for the profession. Editions Rodopi and VIBS are leaving to the keepers of the societies themselves the decisions about how thorough and exhaustive to be about documenting their own histories, but is doing its part by publishing the books according to "ISO 9706: 1994 Information and Documentation" standards for permanence—the translation of which is that these books will last for hundreds of years, and that is why they are being published. HAPS is, as Hull states "saving from obscurity and loss the elements of much philosophy done in the post-modern era" (xi-xii). The present volume is the fourth in the HAPS subseries to appear.

Personalism Revisited documents the history of the Personalist Discussion Group (PDG), which was the first recognized group to begin meeting at the APA gatherings. The PDG was first convened in 1938 at the Eastern APA by its founder Edgar Sheffield Brightman, and has met annually without interruption since. This volume represents a great amount of archival and historical research by the PDG's Editorial Committee. This Committee was appointed in 1983 to compile an archival volume in commemoration to the PDG's fiftieth anniversary, consisting of a selection of some of the best papers presented over the [End Page 81] history of the PDG. The Editorial Committee was made up of the editors of the present volume, Buford and Oliver, along with Jack Padgett and the late Warren Steinkraus. This committee was charged with locating and archiving every paper ever presented at the PDG, with devising guidelines for selecting from among them for the jubilee volume, and with getting the volume published. In 2002 the committee completed its charge—no one has ever alleged that archival committees work quickly, and one must not judge their excellence upon that criterion. This particular archival committee has done a tremendous job, and the amount of effort expended in documenting and structuring this volume has been immense. Philosophers rarely have the patience of historians with documentation and research, but this committee has shown the historian's kind of patience and attention to detail. Personalism Revisited contains, in addition to the selected essays, a list of the papers given at the PDG's Eastern Division Meetings, including their places of subsequent publication, in cases in which the essays were later published (perhaps three-fourths of the essays have appeared in various journals and books). There are some inevitable gaps in the list, in early years, since no one was keeping records (or the records cannot be found) regarding groups meeting concurrently with the APA. The volume makes no attempt to document systematically the somewhat sporadic meetings of the PDG in the APA's Central Division (formerly Western Division). John Lavely devotes some attention to this second group...