By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
Compare the following statements:
"Philosophy is the attempt to make manifest the fundamental evidence as to the nature of things. . . . The aim of philosophy is sheer disclosure. . . . Our lives are passed in the experience of disclosure. As we lose this sense of disclosure, we are shedding the mode of functioning which is the soul. We are descending to mere conformity with the average of the past. Complete conformity means the loss of life" (A. N. Whitehead, Modes of Thought: 67, 87).
"Philosophy is conceived classically as comprehensive critical reflection oriented by the existential question about the meaning of our existence and as therefore including both metaphysics and ethics. . . . If philosophy is understood in something like this classical sense, its proper business is to disclose, at the secondary level of critical reflection, the same truth about human existence that is always already disclosed at least implicitly on the primary level of self-understanding and life-praxis and that . . . Christian witness . . . claim[s] to represent not only explicitly but decisively" ("Paul in Contemporary Theology and Ethics": 292 f.).
23 October 1998
Overview
Content Tools