By Schubert Ogden
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Conceived classically, philosophy is critical reflection, including critical validation as well as critical interpretation, oriented by the existential question about the meaning of human existence in its ultimate setting. As such, it includes logical analysis culminating in metaphysics and ethics, and its proper business is to disclose, at the secondary level of critical reflection, the same truth about existence that is always already disclosed at least implicitly on the primary level of self-understanding and life-praxis as mediated by religion and culture.
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Existentialist philosophy, being philosophy, is critical appropriation of self-understanding and life-praxis generally, as mediated explicitly by religion and implicitly by all the other forms of culture
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As such, existentialist philosophy includes both (1) critical interpretation, especially logical analysis, of religion and all the other forms of culture; and (2) critical validation of all answers to the existential question, implicit as well as explicit.
In order to be such critical validation, however, it must also include metaphysics and ethics in the sense of logical analysis of the necessary presuppositions of all thought and action.
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An existentialist theology is (1) oriented by the existential question about the meaning of human existence in its ultimate setting; and (2) dependent upon an existentialist conceptuality as the interpretans for critically interpreting its interpretandum, i. e., the witness of faith of which it is the critical appropriation.
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