Novelty

Donald A. Crosby. New York: Lexington Books, 2005.

Like Charles Birch's Feelings (UNSW Press, 1995) or James Felt's Making Sense of Your Freedom (Cornell, 1994) this work is a compact, carefully argued defense of views congenial to process philosophy: the reality of change, the importance of contingency, the active character of mind. Process philosophy is today identified with the names of Alfred North Whitehead or perhaps Henri Bergson. Much in the author's thought is congenial with both. But Donald Crosby's study diverges from them in an important way. Where they make God central to their metaphysics Crosby does not. His metaphysics is "materialistic" or, better, naturalistic. No deity creates or sustains his universe, which sustains and transforms itself. One might associate his thought not with Bergson or Whitehead, but with Samuel Alexander or the early Paul Weiss (Reality, 1938).