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This is the distinction with respect to the concept-term "transcendental," which I have sometimes used in distinction from "historical" – as, for example, in the thesis: "A religion's explicit primal source of authority is thus the historical, as distinct from the transcendental, source [implicitly] authorizing its claim to decisive existential authority" (5 December 1994). (Elsewhere, however, I have used "transhistorical" in place of "transcendental" – as, for example, when I say, "the point is that the object side of the religious correlation is itself duplex, having a historical as well as a transhistorical aspect, each dialectically related to the other. Otherwise put: the object side of the religious correlation itself involves a correlation -- in correlation—in Boff's terms -- between terms—between an 'order of manifestation' and an 'order of constitution' relative to the subject side of the correlation" [10 June 1989; rev. 5 January 2001].) In the case of this further distinction, however, the distinguishing adjectives are not "existential" and "empirical," but "existential" and "metaphysical," which yield the distinction between "existential-transcendental" and "metaphysical-transcendental." Whereas the first means the transcendental in its meaning for us, the second means the transcendental in its structure in itself -- itself— just as "existential-historical" means the historical in its meaning for us, while "empirical-historical" means the historical in its structure in itself. Of course, the difference, requiring one to characterize this distinction as only analogous to the other is the logical-ontological type difference between "the transcendental" and "the categorial" -- —"the historical" being simply a special case of "the categorial."

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