937. Question: Doesn't Heidegger's . . .

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Question: Doesn't Heidegger's existentialist analysis in Sein und Zeit perform something like the same function that Hartshorne assigns to (in my words!) "the ultimate or completely general theory of awareness, experience, or knowing, including a theory of givenness, of what it is to be aware of, experience, or know something as given, as datum"?

Granted that there are differences between these two things, and that some of them may be significant, it still seems to me that this part of Heidegger's early work may be said to belong to what Hartshorne speaks of as "logic in the broad sense" even as (again, in my words) "an ultimate or completely general theory of concrete entities as such" also belongs to it.

So I should say that, just as transcendental metaphysics in a broad sense includes something like Heidegger's existentialist analysis, so "logic in the broad sense" that includes transcendental metaphysics includes it as thus inclusive.

Cf. Notebooks, 5 October 2004

Logic as the a priori theory of reasoning, or of rational inference, should be conceived broadly enough to include some elucidation of two things: the ultimate or completely general theory of concrete entities as such (from which all abstract entities in some fashion derive); and the ultimate or completely general theory of awareness, experience, or knowing, including a theory of givenness, of what it is to be aware of, experience, or know something as given, as datum.

Theism necessarily implies that, if and when we have such a broadly conceived logic, such a completed theory of the a priori in reality as well as in experience, the idea of God, conceived as the universal individual, will prove to be integral to it. Why? Because the idea of God can be defined with nothing other than the completely general idea of something concretely real and knowable; for one has only to quantify this idea universally in order to distinguish its referent radically from everything else (cf. AD: 43 ff.).

Of course, the idea of God (just as any other utterly general, metaphysical idea) may be said to be "extralogical," in that it is beyond logic in the strict sense in which it is usually understood, as distinct from the broad sense just clarified. But this may in no way be taken to imply that the proposition, "God exists," is merely "empirical," in the usual sense of "conceivably falsifiable by experience"; for it isn't. In the broad sense of the term indicated above, it's "logical."

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Logicians will either have to be or become such in a broader sense than that in which "logic" is usually understood or else also have to be or become metaphysicians if they want to consider with care what is meant by such things as:
(1) the variables in quantification, or the variables for individuals;
(2) the lowest logical level, i.e., first-level entities = entities on the first logical level = values of the variables for individuals; or
(3) modalities in their extra-linguistic reference.

5 October 2004