Whitehead claims that Creativity is the Category of the Ultimate, the characterization of all actuality as a creative advance.  Unlike Whitehead’s most ardent disciples, however, I see this account itself not as unique sui generis, but instead as a novel synthesis (as well as an extensive revision) of the many earlier attempts in the history of Western philosophy to comprehend the nature of Actuality as Becoming rather than Being per se.  Whitehead’s unique contribution is a description of what might be called the “quantum of explanation:” the “actual entity” is not, as Whiteheadians mostly believe, some sort of “ontological rival” to the particles of quantum physics, but instead offer a blueprint for the togetherness of the necessary components or features that any actual occasion or epochal “drop” of actual experience must embody if truly “actual.”  The actual entity “is not a bit of physical existence. It is a conceptual tool that helps arrest temporal passage and the flux of the physical universe” (Auxier & Herstein).  The actual entity is thus not an atom, subatomic particle, or even a Leibnizian monad in this sense of the smallest unit of being. Instead, each of these entities (and every other sort of actuality) exhibits, in turn, the explanatory characteristics of discrete “actual entities.” Whitehead was searching for a way to give a coherent account of a universe composed of multifarious events of otherwise diverse and constantly changing pattern, and so a basic unit or quantum of explanation is required that applies to such diversity universally, in order finally to satisfy the quest for the actual.  
  
George Lucas (a philosopher, not the famous film director) is recognized for his work in two distinct areas:  (1) metaphysics and the history of modern philosophy; (2) moral theory and applied ethics.   
  
In the first area he initially focused on A.N. Whitehead, G.W.F. Hegel, R.G. Collingwood, and the development of process metaphysics. His dissertation at Northwestern University in 1978, Two Views of Freedom in Process Thought, was selected by the American Academy of Religion for publication in the initial AAR Dissertation Series (#28) in 1979. His subsequent work, supported by a bibliographical fellowship from the American Theological Library Association, was published as The Genesis of Modern Process Thought (Scarecrow Press, 1983) and selected as an outstanding academic book by Choice magazine. He was perhaps best known in this area for a subsequent book, The Rehabilitation of Whitehead (State University of New York Press, 1990) and most recently, The Ordering of Time: Meditations on the History of Philosophy (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), subsequently awarded the J.N. Findlay Prize by the Metaphysical Society of America in 2024.  From 2010 to 2024, Lucas served as the General Editor of the Collected Edition of A.N. Whitehead, also published by Edinburgh U.P.  He was elected President of the Metaphysical Society of America in 2016, and awarded the MSA’s “Paul Weiss Founder’s Medal” in 2022.  
  
Lucas’s second area of work is ethics and applied ethics.  His historical focus is on Kant and deontological ethics. The applied focus is principally on the fields of military ethics, the ethics of war and peace, and ethics and emerging military technologies. He is a member and past president of the International Society for Military Ethics. His works include Military Ethics: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford U.P., 2016), Ethics and Cyberwarfare (Oxford U.P., 2017), Ethics and Military Strategy in the 21st Century: Moving Beyond Clausewitz (Routledge, 2019), and Law, Ethics, and Emerging Military Technologies: Confronting Disruptive Innovation (Routledge, 2023).  He is co-editor (with CAPN W.R. Rubel, USN) of Ethics and the Military Profession and a companion volume, Case Studies is Military Ethics (Pearson, 2003-2015) among the most widely used textbooks in this field in the world.  
  
Lucas was a tenured professor at the Santa Clara University, Clemson University, the U.S. Naval Academy, and the Naval Postgraduate School. He retired in 2014, after which he served over the subsequent decade as a visiting professor at Notre Dame University, Case-Western University, the French Military Academy (St.-Cyr), and finally as the Stockdale Professor of Ethics at the U.S. Naval War College (Newport, RI). He is currently an adjunct visiting professor at the Southern Illinois University (Carbondale IL), where he is A.N. Whitehead Professor of Philosophy and Director, the Center for Process Studies Archives.

American Institute of Philosophical and Cultural Thought: George R. Lucas, Jr. “In Quest of Actuality” (8/2/2026)