1348.Metaphysics

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Metaphysics/ in the sense in which I understand it/ proceeds on the assumption that/ just as we ourselves have an inner as well as an outer aspect/ so also does anything else that/ like ourselves/ is concrete and singular. On this assumption/ then/ metaphysics seeks to explicate what is perforce necessarily implied about this inner aspect of all things by all that we think! say/ and do in somehow understanding ourselves/ others, and the whole and leading our lives accordingly.

This distinction between the "inner" and the "outer" aspects of things is obviously of a piece with the distinctions I make between (1) the "existential" and the "empirical" aspects of experience and reality and their "vertical" and "horizontal" dimensions, and (2) "ultimate reality" and "immediate reality/ or the "ultimate" and the "immediate" settings of self-understanding and life-praxis.

11 December 2005; rev. 11 December 2006