Page History

SCANNED PDF

Heinrich Scholz, Metaphysik als strenge Wissenschaft. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1965 (unchanged photographic impression of the K6lnKöln, 1941 edition) 

I. General Comments 

Of the many points made in this fascinating book, four seem the most memorable: It seems possible in principle to develop a metaphysics which is, in effect, indistinguishable from logic, as (in the Kantian sense) a system of formal truths (152). Such a metaphysics may also be said to be an ontology in the sense of "a theory that includes the totality of truths that can be formulated ... about things that can be meaningfully grasped as individuals, and thus are truths that are not restricted to any particular realms of individuals or worlds but are of unrestricted validity" (13 f.). _Such a metaphysics, however, is not the whole of philosophy, but, at most, its "transcendental-philosophical," as distinct from its "real-philosophical," dimension or aspect. The contrast between the two aspects lies in that,(1) whereas the truths established by the former apply toevery possible_ world, the truths established by the latter apply to this actual world, to which we ourselves inescapably belong; and (2) the former has the certainty of a "strict science" (in a sense even stricter than mathematics, since mathematical judgments are "synthetic," rather than lIanalytic" [170]), whereas the judgments of "realphilosophy" are necessarily "synthetic" or "contingent" (176 f.) and also belong to "the realm of proclamation," not "the realm of research" (158), having something of the nature of a "confession" about them (161). (Here it may not be irrelevant to remark that Scholz's "synthetic" or "contingent" seems rather like Hartshorne's in that it covers everything that is not "analytic," "necessary," and "formal," including therefore both physical science and matters of faith [171], despite the obvious and important differences between them. Also, what Scholz allows as a "real-philosophical metaphysics of nature," or "an ontology of the actual world" [162 ff., 181] is perhaps more properly called "a cosmology," while what he calls a "real-philosophical metaphysics of the human spirit" [168 ff.] is perhaps not too different from what Bultmann, say, means by "a theology," or even what Heidegger means by "a fundamental ontology," i.e. a [philosophical or metaphysical] anthropology.) 

Essential to any "ontology of the actual world" is a theory of identity that can be applied to individuals that are bound to time, i.e., a theory of "genidentity" (181), according to which we can say that an individual is identical with itself at two different moments of time. (Scholz apparently thinks that there are or could be individuals that are not thus "genidentical." But the interesting question, surely, is whether such an individual could be anything other than an occasion of experience or an "actual entity" in Whitehead's sense of the words. I.e., could the general category of individuals having strict identity warrant the classical conception of God as neither a genidentical individual nor an actual entity?) _There is no possibility that a statement attributing our knowledge of the _veritates aeternae to the illumination of the soul by God can itself, as a "statement of faith," ever appear as one of the statements of metaphysics in the strict sense (171). Hartshorne is doubtless correct that Scholz does not seem to see how necessarily existent individual could very well be one of the individuals existing in every possible world, and therefore such as to be properly affirmed even by a strict metaphysics. Still, the question remains whether necessarily existing individual is simply the same as God, or whether (as Hartshorne himself seems to admit in allowing that talk about God is, in essential respects, "analogical") Scholz is partly correct after all in holding that assertions about God as such are not metaphysical in the strict sense but assertions of personal faith. 

...