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Schubert Ogden's Transcendental Strategy Against Secularism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 June 2011
Extract
Schubert Ogden is often considered a process theologican because, drawing upon the philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne, he holds a “process” view of the nature of reality and of God. But the strategy used in his philosophical theology makes Ogden a sort of “transcendental” theologian as well. I refer to Ogden's argument in The Reality of God that a necessary condition of the possibility of scientific and moral activity is the kind of confidence in the meaning and worth of life that must be seen as an implicit faith in God. This faith might be characterized as innate or a priori because Ogden portrays it not as derived from, but as presupposed by, all our experience; indeed, Ogden claims that such faith is the necessary condition of the possibility of even “secular” scientific and moral experience. Thus one might see this part of his philosophical theology as pursuing a transcendental strategy of argument.
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References
1 Ogden, Schubert M., The Reality of God (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1977) 6-9, 15Google Scholar.
2 Ibid., 9-12.
3 Ibid., 20.
4 Ogden, Schubert M., “The Task of Philosophical Theology,” in Evans, Robert A., ed.. The Future of Philosophical Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1971) 59, 64Google Scholar.
5 Ibid., 65, 67, 69.
6 , Ogden, “The Task of Philosophical Theology,” 71Google Scholar; idem, The Reality of God, x.
7 , Ogden, The Reality of God, 30Google Scholar.
8 Toulmin, Stephen Edelston, An Examination of the Place of Reason in Ethics (Cambridge: –Cambridge University Press, 1958) 204Google Scholar.
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10 Ibid., 33.
11 Ibid., 32-33.
12 Ibid., 35-36.
13 Ibid., 34.
14 Ibid., 35.
15 Ibid., 36.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid., 37-38; the James quote is from James, William, Some Problems of Philosophy: A Beginning of an Introduction to Philosophy (New York: Longmans, Green, 1911) 62Google Scholar.
18 Ibid., 40.
19 Ibid., 140.
20 Ibid., 43.
21 Ibid., 47.
22 Ibid., 48.
23 Ibid., 64.
24 Ibid., 38, citing Toulmin, Stephem Edelston, The Uses of Argument (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958) 38Google Scholar. Toulmin does not use such a distinction as applied to the term “reality” but as applied to “possibility.” The extrapolation appears to be Ogden's.
25 , Ogden, The Reality of God, 107Google Scholar.
26 Ibid., 32-33.
27 Ibid., x-xi.
28 Ibid.
29 In his review of Ogden's book, Antony Hew comments that “Ogden himself never spells out simply, fully, and precisely what the presupposition [of unconditional significance] is believed to be and by what logical chain it is thought to be linked to the ongoings [moral activity] by which it is presupposed.” Flew, Antony, “Reflections on ‘The Reality of God’” JR 48 (1968) 153Google Scholar.
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31 Ibid., 36-37; the Whitehead quote is from Schilpp, Paul A., ed., The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (2d ed.; New York: Tudor, 1951) 698Google Scholar.
32 Harman, Gilbert, The Nature of Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977) 11Google Scholar.
33 For this use of the term see Pojman, Louis P., ed., Ethical Theory (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1989) 108–9Google Scholar.
34 For these distinctions see Brink, David O., Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) 218–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
35 Paul Edwards, among others, has used such terms. See Edwards, Paul, “The Meaning and Value of Life,” in Klemke, E. D., ed., The Meaning of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981) 129–31Google Scholar.
36 Taylor, Richard, “The Meaning of Life,” in Klemke, , ed., The Meaning of Life, 141–50Google Scholar.
37 This feature was brought to my attention in a lecture by John Fischer.
38 See , Brink, Moral Realism, 39–42Google Scholar.
39 , Ogden, The Reality of God, 36Google Scholar.
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