By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
On Logical-Ontological Type-Distinctions
What differences in, or qualifications of, Hartshorne's list of logical-ontological type-distinctions follow from my alternative to his categorial metaphysics?
There would appear to be the need for at least two such distinctions that Hartshorne does not make—at least not explicitly.
Given my proposal to distinguish between metaphysics in a strict sense and in a broad sense, one must distinguish among subjects(= concretes = instances) between events (or states), individuals, and aggregates in general and the unique events (or states), individuals, and aggregates implied by the concept of understanding or self-understanding individual in particular. What better term could be proposed for a self-understanding individual than "existence" in the emphatic sense in which existentialist philosophers use the term? (Off-hand, I see no reason why, given the concept or term, "self-understanding individual," room cannot be made within "first philosophy" not only for the whole of "fundamental ontology," i.e., "existentialist analysis" [Heidegger], but also for the whole of "universal pragmatics" [Habermas] or "transcendental hermeneutics" [Apel]. Insofar, indeed, as there is an understanding of existence that is given at least implicitly with existence itself, metaphysics, understood as integral intellectual self-understanding, comprises the explication of this understanding of existence as well as the understanding of ultimate reality and of strictly ultimate reality inseparable from it.)
Given my further proposal to distinguish between categorial and transcendental metaphysics, one must distinguish among properties (= abstracts = objects) between ordinary properties, i.e., individualities, species, genera, and categories, on the one hand, and extraordinary properties, i.e., transcendentals, on the other. By "transcendental properties" (passiones entis), I mean simply the properties expressed by (1) the completely general or neutral idea of "reality" as well as by all the other ideas with which it is convertible (passiones e. convertibiles); and (2) the several logical-ontological type-distinctions spanned by the completely general or neutral idea of "reality" as well as all the other distinctions necessarily implied thereby—such as, e.g., concrete and abstract, relative and absolute, contingent (actual/possible) and necessary (passiones e. disjunctae). All such transcendental properties can be expressed by terms applying univocally to any and all entities, assuming the relevant logical-ontological type-distinctions. Thus, for example, any individual as such can be said to be "concrete," not in a different sense, but in the same sense in which any other individual as such can be said to be "concrete."
Categorial properties, by contrast, can be expressed only by terms applying univocally to some (kind of) entities, but not to others. Insofar as the same categorial terms are applied to any and all entities, even of the same logical-ontological type, they can be applied only equivocally, or, at best, symbolically or metaphorically.
6 July 1982; rev. 24 July 2002
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