The Pardshaw Dialogues: Sense Awareness and the Passage of Nature
by Dorothy Emmet (ed.)

The Participants

This is a list of those participating in the dialogue which follows:

R. B. Braithwaite is a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, and former Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Cambridge. His publications include Scientific Explanation (1953), An Empiricist Looks at Religious Belief (1955).

Christopher Clarke read mathematics at Cambridge where he completed a Ph.D. on general relativity. Since then he has worked on various aspects of relativity and quantum theory at Cambridge, Hamburg, and the University of York and is the author of Elementary General Relativity. He is now Professor of Applied Mathematics in the University of Southampton.

Dorothy Emmet attended Whitehead’s seminars at Harvard in 1929. She was Professor of Philosophy in the University of Manchester from 1947-1966, when she retired to Cambridge, where she edited Theoria to Theory. Her books include Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism (1932; second edition 1966), The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking (1946), and The Effectiveness of Causes (1984).

Margaret Masterman, the chief instigator of these dialogues, died in April, 1986. She was Director of Research at the Cambridge Language Research Unit from 1956 and a Founder Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge. Though her projected book on language was never written, her publications include "Metaphysical and Ideographic Language" in British Philosophy in the Mid-Twentieth Century; ‘The Nature of a Paradigm" in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (1970); "Braithwaite and Kuhn: Analogy clusters within and without hypothetico-deductive systems in Science" in Science, Belief and Behaviour; Essays in Honour of R. B. Braithwaite (1980); and "First Impressions of a Whiteheadian Model of Language" in Whitehead und der Prozessbegriff (1984).

Rupert Sheldrake read natural sciences at Cambridge and studied philosophy at Harvard. He took a Ph.D. in plant biochemistry at Cambridge and then, as Research Fellow of Clare College and of the Royal Society, carried out research on the hormonal control of plant development. From 1974-1978 he was Plant Physiologist at the International Crops Research Institute of the semi-arid tropics in Hyderabad, India, where he is now a consultant. His books include A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Formative Causation (1981) and The Presence of the Past (to be published in 1988).

Jonathan Westphal studied Philosophy at Harvard, Sussex, and London where he completed a Ph.D. on colour perception. He was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the University of Munich. Since these dialogues took place, his book Colour has been published in the Aristotelian Society Book Series. He was at one time the assistant editor of Theoria to Theory.