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It has become increasingly clear to me that Hartshorne's psychical ism and Post's physicalism are formally very much alike. Each, in its way, is an essay in-to use Post's term-"nonreductive metaphysics." Although both are substantively pluralistic, both are also attributively monistic, Post's being an attempt at a metaphysics, as I've put it, "within the limits ofphysics alone," Hartshorne's, an attempt at a metaphysics, as it were, "within the limits ofpsychics alone" (cf. Hartshorne's "Physics and Psychics: The Placc ofMind in Nature"). Accordingly, both ofthem bear the burden of arguing that their respective positions are not reductive--in Post's case, by seeking to show that his physicalism in no way reduces everything to what can be thought and spoken of in the terms of mathematical physics; in Hartshorne's case, by seeking to show that his psychicalism neither holds that "everything is psychic" nor is vulnerable to the objection ofbeing excessively anthropomorphic.
For all oftheir formal similarity, however, the two positions are also strikingly different in their respective understandings ofmetaphysics. For Post, metaphysics simply is physics insofar as it is employed for the purposes ofunifying all discursive and nondiscursive ways of understanding and transforming the actual world. For Hartshorne, on the other hand, metaphysics is not at all identical with any special science, however employed, including psychics, because metaphysics' concern is not merely with the actual world but with all possible worlds, or better, all possible kinds of world. In other words, whereas, in Post's view, metaphysical statements, as much as those ofphysics or any other special science, are logically contingent, in Hartshorne's view, they are logically necessary, and so different in type from any scientific statement. Still another way of saying this is that metaphysical statements, for Post, are factual statements subject to factual falsification, while for Hartshorne, they are nonfactual statements that cannot be falsified factually, but only logically, by showing that they could not be true.
In one important respect, then, Post's physicalism is the more consistent and coherent ofthe two projects. IfI am right, however, it necessarily implies something like my broadly transcendental metaphysics, which requires to be made explicit ifits own most fundamental presuppositions and implications are to be accounted for. So in this