Albury Castell (1904-1987), Canadian born and educated at Toronto, taught in America after his Ph.D. at Chicago. His primary interests were in the philosophy of mind and logic. Like the hedgehog, Castell had a great single idea that he developed and applied. The idea was that there were two strikingly different modes of behavior: “activity” and “process.” The mode of activity was the mode of a human being as he reasoned with other human beings and reasoned about the natural world. The description of the activity of reasoning to a conclusion is given in logic. Castell’s logic text, A College Logic, was a standard in the field before Copi’s work, and a model text for a non-calculus logic. The mode of process was the mode of a natural object described by causal laws. A planet exhibits processes in its rotations and revolutions, while an astronomer exhibits activity in discovering the causal laws of planetary processes by means of the probing questions ofreason. Unlike the planet’s processes, the astronomer’s activity is fallible, purposive, critical, verifiable, and requires presuppositions. The grammar of the behavior of persons is different from that of objects. In The Self In Philosophy, Castell presents three theories of mind. The first – “The Process View” – is that mind is adequately explained in the terms of process alone. The second is the “No Agent View” which allows for the activities of mind, but denies the entity of the self as an agent. And the third, Castell’s own, is called “The Self As Agent View” and, like Kant’s “transcendental apperception of the ego,” asserts the necessity of a self as a presupposition of activity. On self and its activity hang all of human reasoning and the resulting disciplines and sciences. Castell used his distinction of activity and process to describe the differences and tasks of the disciplines and sciences which make up human knowledge. He presented such descriptions in Philosophy and the Teacher’s World – a collection of essays on the philosophy of education. The learner is an agent practicing the activity of coming to know. Coming to know is syllogizing based upon prior knowledge and presuppositions. Logic is the study of this activity. Science is the result of the activity of coming to know as it is applied to the processes of natural objects. Some paradigm sciences are physics, chemistry, physiology, and geology. A discipline, by contrast, is the activity of coming to know the rationale or mode of activity, such as history, art, literature, or law. Philosophy, the queen discipline, has branches: ethics, politics, aesthetics, epistemology, etc. The role of philosophy in these branches is to provide a description of the logic and presuppositions of such modes of activity or processes. The description of the activity of behaving morally is ethics. Social scientists lay claim to describing processes. But Castell sees agents and activities as the subjects studied in these fields. Mathematics falls into neither group. In this manner, he provides a map of the world of human knowledge – the teacher’s world.
His insistence that psychology includes the study of an agent and its activities, led his long-time colleague and adversary B.F. Skinner to write Castell into his novel Walden Two as the villain Augustine Castle, the trogdolyte opponent of behavioral science. In addition to the above mentioned books, he wrote a popular Introduction to Modern Philosophy, An Elementary Ethics, editions of several historical texts, scholarly papers, papers on liberal education, and numerous lectures for radio, television, and general university audiences. Castell’s papers, published articles, and books are held in the Andrews Library Archives at The College of Wooster.