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"[W]e may question . . . that scientific explanation is the only explanation or, if the word 'explanation' be pre-empted for what is attempted by science, the only way of giving a rational account (in the sense of the λογον διδοναι) or trying to understand and render intelligible in terms of our experience. Ever since Aristotle, metaphysics has been generally understood as the attempt to give a rational account of being qua being or, in less traditional terms, of the strictly universal structures of reality which experience discloses. But this means that no metaphysics is properly concerned with explaining why this is the case instead of that; metaphysics has the quite different task of understanding what it means to say that anything is the case at all. . . . [T]he metaphysician's proper question is not, 'What are the facts?' but, rather, 'What is it to be a fact?'" (174).

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"'[M]etaphysics' refers to that form of critical reflection which seeks to make fully explicit and understandable the most fundamental presuppositions of all our experience and thought, or . . . the most universal principles that are the strictly necessary conditions of the possibility of anything whatever. Because these presuppositions or principles are radically more fundamental or universal than any other, they can be understood in terms of our ordinary concepts only by analogy, or by generalizing these concepts well beyond the limits of their ordinary uses. Thus one metaphysics differs from another primarily because of the concepts, especially the key concept, it chooses to generalize and because of the consistency or thoroughness of its generalizations.... [P]rocess metaphysics, then, .  . . differs from every other because of the consistent and thoroughgoing way in which it generalizes the key concept of 'freedom.'. . .

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"1. To exist as a self at all is possible solely on the basis of faith, so that the statement,  'Unless you believe, you shall not understand,' is true in a sense not only of the Christian or of the religious believer but of every human being simply as such. . . .

"2. Philosophy in general is the fully reflective understanding of the basic existential faith that is constitutive of human existence. . . .

"3. The task of philosophical theology, which is integral to philosophy's central task as metaphysics, is so to understand our common faith as to answer the basic question of the reality of God. . . .

"4. Precisely as the task of an independent philosophy, philosophical theology is necessarily presupposed by a specifically Christian theology whose task is the fully reflective understanding of Christian faith" (OT [1986]: 69, 73, 78,84).

"[T]here is reason to hold that the philosophies of science, art, law, religion, etc., are all peripheral philosophical disciplines and are important, in the final analysis, only in relation to philosophy's central task of metaphysics. . . .

"Historically, metaphysics has been conceived from its beginnings as the noncompressible core of philosophy, understood as an absolutely basic and comprehensive science. As such, it eventually came to be differentiated into metaphysica generalis, or ontology, which is the understanding of the completely general features of reality, and metaphysica specialis, as comprising psychology, cosmology, and philosophical (or 'natural') theology, which are devoted respectively to understanding the three basic realities of the self, the world, and God. Needless to say, this conception of the exact scope and content of metaphysics reflects the material metaphysical conclusions of the main tradition of Western philosophy. But even in the case of philosophies which reject these conclusions—which deny, say, that God is ultimately real or else so radically reinterpret what 'God' means that philosophical theology is in effect reduced to cosmology or psychology—the essential structure of metaphysical inquiry may still be readily discerned. It invariably involves the most basic and comprehensive questions that can occur to the human mind, and the procedure it follows in answering these questions always involves some form or other of the transcendental method, by which I mean simply the raising to full self-consciousness of the basic beliefs that are the necessary conditions of the possibility of our existing or understanding at all. In other words, metaphysics is the vital center of the entire critico-constructive undertaking that is philosophical reflection. It is for its sake, ultimately, that all the special philosophical inquiries exist for they are really so many contributions to its one central task: to reflect on the faith by which we live and in this way to understand the nature of reality as disclosed to this faith" (76 f.).

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"[T]he existential question to which any religion claims to represent the answer is the question of the meaning of ultimate reality for us. This means, first of all, that the reality about which it asks is the ultimate reality of our own existence in relation to others and the whole. . . . [W]hatever else we may or may not find ourselves obliged to take account of, we can never fail to take account somehow of ourselves, others, and the whole to which we all belong. In this sense, the threefold reality of our existence simply as such is the ultimate reality that we all have to allow for in leading our own individual lives. But if this reality is what the existential question asks about, the second thing to note is how it does this—namely, by asking about this reality, not in its structure in itself, but in its meaning for us. This implies that in asking about ultimate reality, the existential question asks, at one and the same time, about our authentic self-understanding, about the understanding of ourselves in relation to others and the whole that is appropriate to, or authorized by this ultimate reality itself.

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"This means, of course, that, by the very nature of the existential question, there are also two main aspects to the procedures appropriate to determining the truth of specific religious answers to it. . . . [W]hether, or to what extent, a specific religious answer is [true] can be determined only by verifying its necessary implications, ethical as well as metaphysical. If it is true, its implications also must be true; and unless they can be verified by procedures appropriate to ethical and metaphysical claims respectively, it cannot be verified, either" (TR [1992]: 16-19).

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