Eric Elder
I’m obviously not Dr. Davis, but I hope this helps: Allison Heartz Johnson (1910-1983) was the long-time head of the philosophy department at the University of Western Ontario. I haven’t found much “auto-philosophizing,” if you will, but he did produce extensive introductory texts to Whitehead and Dewey, and to some more general philosophical schemes, such as “experiential realism.” His association with Whitehead was close: he was doctoral student under Whitehead at Harvard, his dissertation being a study of the nature of actual entities.
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Hi Rick. The short answer to your question is “no.” As I mentioned, my inroad into this line of inquiry was the composer, pianist, critic, and theorist Rudolph Reti. In the two books he published during his life, he makes reference to Science and the Modern World and Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead. Some archival work turned up further indebtedness to Whitehead’s philosophy, particularly the speculative cosmology. Thus, I find it interesting that he never made explicit reference to Process and Reality. Reti’s writings have been subject to much criticism over the past seventy years, much of it quite harsh, but I am the first to uncover or consider the influence of Whitehead therein.
Reti worked almost exclusively within the Western classical tradition, and — according to my reading — he found Whiteheadian process best exemplified in Beethoven and Brahms. His analysis of Beethoven’s Ninth is remarkable in its Whiteheadian implications. Unfortunately, most of his analyses are fragmentary, and any sketches of more complete versions that may have once existed are lost. My work starts from a critique of Reti’s that has at its base the need to expand his search for mimetic exemplars to a broader understanding of the role of Whiteheadian process in our appreciation of music at all levels of interaction, and the problems it presents.
Thank you, Leslie. Waco is a long way from New England. Surely DJ isn’t a Sox fan?!