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
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