The AIPCT is pleased to welcome Dr. George R. Lucas (Professor, US Naval Academy) to provide a seminar, “‘The Tragical History of Dr. Beneke,” on Thursday, February 22, 2024. The seminar is free and open to the public, light refreshments and drinks provided (you may also bring your own), to be followed by a reception for Professor Lucas and a celebration of the relocation of the Whitehead Papers and the holdings of the Center for Process Studies (formerly in Claremont, CA) to SIU Carbondale and the AIPCT.
Those who cannot attend in person may join on-line byu requesting a Zoom link at this address: personalist61@gmail.com
Doors open at 6 at AIPCT, 411 N. 9th Street, Murphysboro, IL 62966.
The Seminar
Frederick Beneke (1798-1854) published a number of important works between 1820 and 1854 that easily could have made him one of the major intellectual voices of the 19th century. But his ideas were too progressive for state authorities and he was denied so much as a license to teach. John Stuart Mill wrote in 1845 that Beneke’s ideas were very much like his own (and of course earlier), already moving beyond Absolute Idealism, and even Mill, a generation later was regarded as too radical for a conservative age. But Mill was not effectively shunned or silenced, as Beneke was. What were these ideas? This seminar tells the story of intellectual culture in Northern Europe in the early to mid-19th century, and how it affected the story we now tell of the growth of empirical sociology, psychology and the theory of knowledge from that era.
The Seminar Leader
George R. Lucas Jr.
Professor Lucas is “Distinguished Chair in Ethics” Emeritus at the U.S. Naval Academy, and Professor Emeritus of Ethics and Public Policy at the Graduate School of Public Policy at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He has taught at Georgetown University, Notre Dame University, Emory University, Case-Western Reserve University, Randolph-Macon College, the French Military Academy (Saint-Cyr), and the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, and most recently served as the Vice Admiral James B. Stockdale Professor of Ethics at the U.S. Naval War College (Newport RI). His main areas of interest are applied moral philosophy and military ethics, and he has written on such topics as: irregular and hybrid warfare, cyber conflict, military and professional ethics, and ethical challenges of emerging military technologies.
Lucas served until January 2024 as General Editor of the multi-volume Critical Edition of the Works of Alfred North Whitehead (Edinburgh University Press), a project inspired in part by his critically-acclaimed early work, The Rehabilitation of Whitehead: An Analytic and Historical Evaluation of Process Philosophy (State University of New York Press, 1989). A past president of the Metaphysical Society of America (2016), he was awarded the Society’s “Paul Weiss Founder’s Medal,” its most prestigious honor, at the Society’s annual meeting at Marquette University in March 2022.
A Summa cum Laude graduate in Physics from the College of William and Mary, he is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Omicron Delta Kappa, and received the Sigma Xi Research Award in 1971 for his work in intermediate energy particle physics, published in The Physical Review (1973). Professor Lucas received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Northwestern University in 1978.
Lucas is the author of nine books, more than seventy peer-reviewed journal articles, translations, and book reviews, and has also edited several book-length collections of articles in philosophy and ethics. Among these titles are Ethics and Cyber Warfare (Oxford University Press, 2017), Military Ethics: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2016), The Routledge Handbook of Military Ethics (Routledge, 2015), Anthropologists in Arms: the Ethics of Military Anthropology (AltaMira Press, 2009), and Perspectives on Humanitarian Military Intervention (University of California Press, 2001). His most recent books are Beyond Clausewitz: The Place of Ethics in Military Strategy (Routledge, 2019), and The Ordering of Time: Meditations on the History of Philosophy (Edinburgh University Press, 2020). A new book on artificial intelligence and emerging military technologies was published in January of 2023: Law, Ethics and Emerging Military Technologies (Routledge).