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It has become increasingly clear to me that Hartshorne's psychicalism and Post's physicalism are formally very much alike. Each, in its way, is an essay in – to in—o use Post's term – term—"nonreductive metaphysics." Although both are substantively pluralistic, both are also attributively monistic, Post's being an attempt at a metaphysics, as I've put it, "within the limits of physics alone," Hartshorne's, an attempt at a metaphysics, as it were, "within the limits of psychics alone" (cf. Hartshorne's "Physics and Psychics: The Place of Mind in Nature"). Accordingly, both of them bear the burden of arguing that their respective positions are not reductive – in reductive—in Post's case, by seeking to show that his physicalism in no way reduces everything to what can be thought and spoken of in the terms of mathematical physics; in Hartshorne's case, by seeking to show that his psychicalism neither holds that "everything is psychic" nor is vulnerable to the objection of being excessively anthropomorphic.

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In one important respect, then, Post's physicalism is the more consistent and coherent of the two projects. If I am right, however, it necessarily implies something like my broadly transcendental metaphysics, which requires to be made explicit if its own most fundamental presuppositions and implications are to be accounted for. So in this other important respect, the neoclassical transcendental metaphysics that Hartshorne works out in developing his psychicalism is the more satisfying of the two projects.

Moreover, from a theological standpoint such as mine, Post's position proves to be anything but nonreductive in "changing the subject" from the talk about God that faith necessarily presupposes and implies to the only "God talk" allowed for by its thoroughgoing contingentism or empiricism. On the other hand, Hartshorne's failure to see that the "God talk" proper to an austerely transcendental metaphysics of possible kinds of world is importantly different from that proper to either religion or philosophy not only leaves metaphysics in an important respect unrevised, but also needlessly encumbers a theology that would be credible as well as appropriate in our situation today.

23 July 2008