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Comment: Migrated to Confluence 4.0

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At the end of the same essay, after having summarized his basic view, Hartshorne asks, "But how ... can we know any such view to be true?" His answer is summarized in brief as follows:

Wiki Markup"That philosophy is true which contains in itself the explanatory power of its rivals, plus additional power of its own. The theory of pervasive freedom explains evil at least as well as any other view could do, for freedom is always risk. But the theory explains good better than any other view, provided we admit a supreme or divine level of freedom, by whose influence all lesser freedom can be benignly guided and coordinated, for freedom thus coordinated is primarily opportunity, and only secondarily risk. Thus freedom, if taken as both divine and non-divine\[,\] is self-explanatory, accounting alike for its failures and its successes. It is the only self-explanatory principle. Order is due to the over-ruling supremacy of divine freedom, disorder to the multiplicity of lesser freedom" (84).

I offer the following comments:

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In at least one place, Hartshorne himself uses the concept "all-explanatory." "In general," he says, "the ultimate or all-explanatory pole of a contrast is that one whose instances can consistently include the instances of the other pole within themselves" (CSPM: 166).unmigrated-wiki-markup

See also "Process as Inclusive Category": 96: "The inclusive category . . . is the one which can contain the contrast which the category involves, while the non-inclusive \ [_sc_. category\] is the one which, if taken as inclusive, would contradict the contrast and so destroy the basis of its own meaning."

I take it to be clear that "inclusive category" is simply another way of saying "ultimate category," and that, therefore, "the inclusive category" is "the all-explanatory (not "self-explanatory") pole of a contrast."