The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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Although philosophy is definitely "a secondary activity" of more or less critical reflection, it itself and as such, or as a whole, is not properly a "science" in the strict sense of the word. Why not? 

Because philosophy is not properly intellectual, but, in its own way, or at its own (secondary) level, is properly existential. Even at its most theoretical, philosophy remains ever oriented, proximately as well as remotely, not by any intellectual question, but by an existential question—indeed, the existential question: the question about how we are to understand ourselves and lead our lives in the ultimate setting in which we find ourselves. 

On the other hand, just as existential questions generally include intellectual questions, which can always be asked by a characteristic abstraction therefrom—from asking existentially about meaning for us to asking intellectually about structure in itself—so science in the strict sense is included in philosophy. But what science? 

The science of the analysis of meaning, and thus of the contexts and presuppositions of meaning, including, above all, its strictly transcendental (and also existentialist) presuppositions. Thus, at its core or center, the science that philosophy is not but necessarily includes is twofold: transcendental metaphysics (in a broad sense inclusive of existentialist analysis) and transcendental ethics. On its periphery, then, in all of the so-called philosophy of . . . disciplines, it is the science of analyzing the meaning and presuppositions of the several other main contexts of meaning: science, religion, law, art, medicine, business, and so on. 

3 October 2002; rev. 10 September 2005; 21 June 2008; 17 October 2009

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