By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
If, as Hartshorne holds, logic and ethics, as well as aesthetics are, in Peirce's words; "normative sciences," whose rules apply to rational beings, not to all beings, as do those of metaphysics, why couldn't the same thing be said about theology?
On such a view; theology formulates the rules that are normative for rational beings insofar as they think and speak (Ξ think, say, and do) concerning God; or the strictly ultimate reality that theistic religions call "God," in its meaning for us; as distinct from its structure in itself.
But my difficulty with this whole way of thinking and speaking is that metaphysics is, in its way, a normative science, also, as, indeed, is any special science, in its way.
Spring 1991