The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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Task: To work out more clearly than I as yet have the relation between (1) a properly developed, strictly transcendental metaphysics and (2) a properly developed, purely formal philosophy of religion.

In principle, it would seem that the first, being concerned, as it is, with the structure of ultimate reality in itself is necessarily included in the second, with its more inclusive concern with the meaning of ultimate reality for us. Of course, a philosophy of religion, as distinct from any religion itself and as such, is concerned with such meaning only indirectly and unintentionally, in the way of critical reflection and proper theory, as distinct from self-understanding and life-praxis. Even so, philosophy of religion, also, is a mode of "existential" thinking and speaking concerned, in its properly theoretical and, therefore, indirect and unintentional way, with the meaning of reality for us and not simply with the structure of reality in itself.

Thus, for example, the ultimate reality with which philosophy of religion is concerned in its meaning for us is evidently one and the same with the ultimate reality with which metaphysics is concerned in its structure in itself.

14 November 1993

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