Metaphysics

Kant’s efforts to limit metaphysics opened new lines for its development. He had thought that reason is established by being limited and that some truths are certain independent of anything that can happen in experience because experience is structured by the interpretive categories reflected in these truths. Thus, it is possible to be certain of the world in its general structure but only insofar as it is an experienced, or phenomenal, world—that is, a world known by man, not a world as it is in itself. Hegel, however, argued persistently that knowledge of a thing unknowable in itself is a contradiction and that reason can know all that is real if the mind first accepts the given thing as “always already within experience as other.” The mutual implication of knowing mind and reality known is accepted, and a science of self-consciousness that relates all categories and all reality to the knowing subject is envisaged. Thus, Kant’s mutual implication of knowing subject and phenomenal thing was given ultimate metaphysical validity by Hegel, and Kant’s reformulations of traditional dualisms—e.g., subject–object, appearance–reality, perceptual–categorial, immanent–transcendent, regulative–constitutive—became momentous for metaphysics. John Dewey

In this milieu, John Dewey, an American educational reformer and pragmatic philosopher, published his “Kant and Philosophic Method” in 1884 in the journal of a group known as the St. Louis Hegelians. Although Dewey later rejected the full-scale Hegelianism expressed in the article, he did so only after gathering up in a partial synthesis the thought of both Kant and Hegel. In this he sounded the thematic notes of much contemporary American and continental metaphysics. Whether or not this metaphysics is explicitly termed transcendental (that is, concerned with experience as determined by the mind’s conceptual and categorial makeup), it does two things: (1) it affirms Kant’s insight that physical particulars cannot first be identified and later interrelated by means of the categories, but, to be identified at all, they must be assumed to be already categorized, and reasoning must proceed to expose those categorial structures that make the actuality of knowledge possible; (2) it agrees with Hegel’s critique at least to the extent that Kant’s idea that the source of sensations is external to the mind in a noumenon is regarded as a transgression of Kant’s own doctrine that the categories, particularly that of causation, can be applied only within phenomenal experience. Dewey thought that Kant confused the empirical and transcendental standpoints by mixing analysis of the organism as sensationally responsive with analysis of mind. Kant forgot that it is only because the knowing subject already grasps the world through its categories that it can self-deceivingly regard its sensations as subjective and as caused by something not known. Thus, for Dewey, “The relation between subject and object is not an external one; it is one in a higher unity that is itself constituted by this relation.”

John DeweyEncyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

In Dewey’s extended later thought, metaphysics became the study of “the generic traits of existence.” Concern with God and immortality slips nearly from view, and this is typical of much contemporary philosophy. Even so, Dewey’s rethinking of the subject–object relation engenders a concept of a democratic and scientific community of persons, bound to each other through common ideals, which has religious overtones. Vague and ambivalent as this concept may be, it helps undermine the whole contrast between immanent and transcendent and leads metaphysics on new paths. William James

The work of William James, a leader of the Pragmatic movement, was typical of many contemporary tendencies, one of which was the attempt to locate the role of science in knowledge and culture. Trained in medicine, James hoped to protect the autonomy of psychology as a science by adopting a dualistic view of mind and matter. He “supposes two elements, mind knowing and thing known, and treats them as irreducible. Neither gets out of itself or into the other, neither in any way is the other.” He presumed that mental states could be identified independent of a commitment to the metaphysical status of the things known by them and that they could then be correlated to the brain. Ironically, his attempts to identify mental states involved him in commitments to the nature of the world as presented to mind. The only meaning that can be given things is in terms of the anticipated consequences of one’s actions upon these things in the world; this anticipation also supplies the meaningfulness of thoughts. This is the basis of the “instrumental” view of thoughts—i.e., reflecting upon thoughts as “tools,” or as “plans of action,” tells one something about the things known by them, the “tooled”; the converse also occurs.

Each realm of the world is experienced in terms of temporal standards of thought natural to that realm; e.g., standards of mathematics are peculiar because of their ideal, changeless objects. These criteria are not derived from mind alone or from things alone but from their relationship in what is termed experience. This is a “double-barreled” term—that is, an experiencing of experienced things. The mind cannot be specified independent of things that appear to the mind, and things cannot be specified independent of their modes of appearing to the mind. Phenomena regarded abstractly as singular, or “pure,” are neutral between mind and matter, which are different contexts of the very same pure experiences—contexts that comprise a single world.

James would not claim that his method is transcendental. Yet the fact remains that for him subject and object cannot be specified independent of each other, and James undercuts dualism and moves toward a transcendental explanation of the conditions of knowledge.

James tried to avoid what can be called logicism, physicalism, and psychologism. The last claimed that, because knowing is a psychical act, all that is known about must be subject to psychological laws. James replied that the known-about, the experienced, has its own autonomy, either as pure experience, a “specific nature” studied by philosophy, as a physical context studied by physics, or, finally, as a psychical context, a human history, studied by psychology. The latter two are both dependent, at least for their ultimate meaningfulness, upon the first. Physicalism attempts to infer the nature of the psychical directly from the physical, thus reducing it to the physical. Most logicisms claimed that pure reason can grasp the real in itself. James agreed that reason entertains ideal objects, the relations between which are fixed independent of the sequence of sensory experience, but he asserted that this experience must decide which necessary truths apply to the world. Although some always do apply, the ascertainment of what is categorial for the world is always incomplete. Just when the world “plays into the hands of logic” is decided in that endless interaction of “worlds” or “orders of experience”—such as the perceptual, the imaginary, the mathematical—occasioned by a thing experienced sifting through the orders trying to find one that can contain it without contradiction; Pegasus, for example, is a mythical creature just because it cannot find a place in the world of real horses. The world of perceptual things, experienced as experienceable by all and as existing simultaneously, serves as a paradigm of reality even though other orders of experience are not reducible to it. Existence is an unusual predicate for James; it means that practical relationship of doing and concern within which things must be able to stand to men if they are to be counted as fundamentally real. James was not giving a subjectivistic account of reality, however, because he included in the fundamentally real all that can be related spatially and temporally to what can stand over against men’s bodily selves. This was commonly forgotten by critics of James’s popularized theory of truth, Pragmatism, which was thus systematically misunderstood.

James’s contemporaries Charles Sanders Peirce and Josiah Royce stood in close dialectical exchange with him on these themes. Differences between them concerned the scope and conditions to be assigned experience. In general, Peirce argued that experience is to be construed more narrowly, in terms of mathematical logic and physics, whereas Royce argued that the understanding of truth, error, and meaning requires the assumption of an absolute knower or experiencer. Peirce was a seminal thinker whose thoughts were often beginnings in the more systematically developed philosophies of the other Americans. Tendencies in continental Europe Edmund Husserl and Phenomenology

Edmund Husserl, the German philosopher, used the term Phenomenology to name a whole philosophy. In order to rid his transcendental investigation of empirical prejudgments and to discover connections of meaning that are necessary truths underlying both physical and psychological sciences, Husserl bracketed and suspended all judgments of existence and empirical causation. He did not deny them; rather, he no longer simply asserted them. He reflected upon their intended meaning. In reflection he claimed to see that things have meaning in terms of how they appear to men in their pre-reflective life and that awareness is in terms of this “how.” In pre-reflective life, however, men are not aware of the “how” as such. By exposing this basic meaning through which men refer to things, he can free their eyes of the “cataracts” of the stereotyped and the obvious and can summon them “back to the things themselves.”

Edmund Husserl, c. 1930.Archiv für Kunst und Geschichte, Berlin

Husserl took traditional metaphysics to be infested with precritical commitments to existence, either physicalistic, psychologistic, or logistic. He used the term ontology, however, to apply to his study of objects of consciousness and even appropriated the Aristotelian term first philosophy. The world appears within the reflective bracket as existentially neutral (that is, as regards whether things have existence in themselves or exist for men) but ontologically ordered because, if various orders of beings exist, then what they are can be nothing but what they are intended to be. And what they are cannot be known until all they are intended to be is known.

Husserl distinguished two types of ontologies: formal ontologies, which are the domain of meanings, or essences, such as “one,” “many,” “whole,” or “part,” that are articulated by formal logic and which Husserl referred to as empty; and material ontologies, which discover and map the meaning and structure of sensory experience through transcendental investigation. In material ontology, for example, the essence of any physical thing is discovered by varying in the imagination the object that is given within its strictly correlative mode of perceptual consciousness; the essence is that identical something that continuously maintains itself during the process of variation. It is intuited that the perceived thing cannot vary in the imagination beyond the point of something given perspectively and incompletely to any given perceiving glance; hence, this is the essence of any physical thing. This is a truth of eidetic necessity and comprises a first principle in Husserl’s projected philosophical science; e.g., numbers are what they are because of the ways in which they are not like things. The Existentialists

Husserl had early distinguished the primary task of description of “morphological essences” (those with “floating” spheres of application in the sensory life) from description of essences like those in geometry, which described closed, or definite, manifolds; but the question of the theoretical status of the ordinary perceptual world, or lived world (Lebenswelt), became increasingly disputed among Existentialists. They asked whether there can be a philosophical science that has made all its presuppositions transparent to itself. If transcendental elucidation of the Lebenswelt, with its historically established sediments of meaning, is really essential to show how theoretical sciences are grounded, then one may reasonably ask how Phenomenology can be sure it has accomplished the elucidation completely because it is itself a theory. The question gained urgency by Husserl’s nearly imperceptible slide into what appeared to be an Idealist position regarding the source of all meaning, a commitment to an absolute ego. If this ego is regarded as individual in any way, the problem arises of how any other individual can be as other because it is constituted in this primal ego.

Husserl’s theory of the ego was rejected by French Existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. For the latter, the bracketing of meanings can never be completed, for consciousness is not an enclosed individual that could grasp through reflection all its possible motivations to experience and give meaning to a world. Knowers are subjects with bodies, whose perceptual life is articulated only incompletely and discloses the world in progressively surprising ways. More meaning is found in existence than can at any moment be expressed, and even the meaning of existence is not reducible to any definable set of meanings.

Husserl’s approach was not nearly radical enough for Martin Heidegger, a German thinker sometimes called an Existentialist. In thinking that he could prescind so neatly from facts and retain the essence of facts, Husserl was still involved to some extent in the prejudgments—the psychologistic, physicalistic, and logistic dualisms—that he inveighed against. For Heidegger there is no realm of consciousness that constitutes meaning, and he does not think that some sharp but harmless line could be drawn between essence and fact. The ambiguity in Husserl’s thought between “object” as sense of the particular and as the encountered particular in its bodily presence is not harmless. It is unjustifiable to think that consciousness can finally demarcate the essential sense of a thing. Thus, Heidegger discarded the very concept of consciousness and proposed a “fundamental ontology” of human being (Dasein). Man as a subject in the world cannot be made the object of sophisticated theoretical conceptions such as “substance” or “cause”; man, furthermore, finds himself already involved in an ongoing world that cannot as a whole be made the object of such conceptions; yet the structure of this involvement is the transcendental condition of any science of objects. For example, a man can band with other men in philosophical groups and can think about the metaphysical status of other men only because he is already essentially with others. He cannot hope to so purify his own thinking that it becomes that of an impersonal thinker, an absolute ego.

Martin Heidegger.Camera Press/Globe Photos

According to Heidegger, to rethink the problem of reality at its roots, it is necessary to rethink the fundamentally temporal, already-given structures of human involvement. Prejudice in the West, which construes reality, or being, on the basis of beings (that is, being as the most general feature of beings), must be overturned, and the problem of the real, the “transcendent,” must be rethought on a ground on which distinctions between immanent and transcendent and between perceptual and categorial have been reconstructed. The being of the world transcends any constitution of the meaning of the world and is a condition of experience. Thus, a sense is required of being not as object but as the underlying condition for the reality of the being of all objects.

Heidegger wanted to propose a genuine phenomenology, a study that would presuppose nothing of the traditionally formulated distinctions such as subjective–objective or phenomenal–real. The transcendence of the world can be understood only as it appears; i.e., when they are encountered openly, things appear as appearing in part, as both revealing and concealing themselves. If to the uneducated eye the Sun appears to be smaller than it is, the naive inference can be corrected only by educating the person to interpret appearances—to calculate, for example, the speed and direction of light. The real is given in and through its appearances. The thought of Whitehead

The thought of Alfred North Whitehead is a distinctive variation on these contemporary themes. Dualisms are undermined by a phenomenology that does not bracket factual assertions. Logical and mathematical deductive schemes must be able to be interpreted in relationships crudely observable in experience, and abstractions of physics and common sense parading as realism (e.g., that things exist separately within their own surfaces) must be revealed for what they are, namely, abstractions. The basic units of reality are organismic unities, “actual occasions,” which are spatial and temporal extensions that cannot be exhaustively expressed in terms of distributions of matter at an instant. Their unity is constituted in a perception-like responsiveness to the universe that, though usually lacking consciousness or apprehension, is an appropriation to and for itself of the whole. This appropriation cannot be exhaustively expressed by point-instant mechanics (mechanics that is worked out in connection with the physics of relativity and thus measures not only the distance but also the time intervals between points) but is minimally a “prehension” (a term proper to Whitehead indicating the point-transcending function of perception and consciousness).

Whitehead, Alfred NorthAlfred North Whitehead.

Each enduring object of ordinary perception—tables, chairs, animals—is, for Whitehead, a “society” of actual occasions inheriting, through a process of appropriation and reenactment in a predictable way, characteristics of its predecessors. Human perception is understood as a special case of prehension, in which qualities of the environment are mediated and projected on the basis of organic and affective experience of the perceiver’s body, but in such a way that some of this process can be acknowledged by the percipient upon reflection. Because human consciousness is regarded as only a special case of prehensive relations, and because vacuous realisms and notions of transcendence are regarded as “fallacies of misplaced concreteness and simple location,” mind–body dualisms are rejected.

Whitehead thought of “the primordial nature of God” as a general ordering of the process of the world, the ultimate basis of all induction and assertion of law, a “conceptual prehension” that functions in the selection of those “eternal objects,” or repeatable patterns that are enacted in the world. God, however, does not create actual entities. He provides them with initial impetus, in the form of their subjective aim, to self-creation. Even God is the outcome of creativity, the process by which the events of the world are synthesized into new unities. It is the creative, not fully predictable, advance into novelty of a pluralistic process. The freedom of man and the determinism of nature were regarded by Whitehead as another artificial dualism.

The future of metaphysics is uncertain, not mainly because of 20th-century critics, the Logical Positivists, but because of its own not fully predictable nor controllable dynamisms. Bruce Withington Wilshire

Citation Information

Article Title: Metaphysics

Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica

Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.

Date Published: 26 July 2019

URL: https://www.britannica.com/topic/metaphysics

Access Date: August 22, 2019

Additional Reading

These works deal mainly with the nature and possibility of metaphysics.

For a discussion of the apparently conflicting views of Plato and Aristotle, see the commentary in Aristotle, Metaphysics, ed. by W.d. Ross, rev. ed., 2 vol. (1924, reissued 1966); and Werner Jaeger, Aristotle: Fundamentals of the History of His Development, 2nd ed. (1948, reprinted 1968; originally published in German, 1923). Modern discussions of the methods of metaphysics are found in René Descartes, The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. by Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross, 2 vol. (1911–12, reprinted with corrections, 1981), and Philosophical Letters, trans. from the French and ed. by Anthony Kenny (1970). On the geometrical form of metaphysics, see the essay by Benedict Spinoza, “Ethica, more geometrico demonstratis,” available in a translation by W. Hale White and rev. by Amelia H. Stirling, Ethic: Demonstrated in Geometrical Order . . ., 4th ed. rev. (1927, reprinted 1930). Christian Wolff combined both the practice and theory of metaphysics in his voluminous metaphysical writings: Vernünfftige [sic] Gedanken von Gott, der Welt und der Seele der Menschen, new enlarged ed. (1751, reprinted 1983), Philosophia Prima Sive Ontologia, 2nd ed. (1736, reprinted 1962), Cosmologia Generalis, rev. ed. (1737, reprinted 1964), Psychologia Rationalis, rev. ed. (1740, reprinted 1972), and Theologia Naturalis, rev. ed., 2 vol. (1739–41, reprinted 2 vol. in 3, 1978–81). Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Metaphysica, 7th ed. (1779, reprinted 1963), was in effect a digest of these last four works. The problem of the origin of ideas was first posed in John Locke, An Essay Concerning Humane [sic] Understanding (1690, reissued 1979), on which G.W. Leibniz wrote a critical commentary, Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain (1765), available also in an English translation ed. by Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett, New Essays on Human Understanding (1981). George Berkeley criticized Materialism in his Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710, reissued 1983), available also in a contemporary edition ed. by Colin M. Turbayne. David Hume applied Empiricist principles with complete generality in A Treatise of Human Nature, 3 vol. (1739–40, reprinted in 1 vol., 1975), and An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748, reissued 1977).

Immanuel Kant first discussed metaphysical method in his essay “Inquiry into the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morals,” available in a translation by Lewis White Beck, Critique of Practical Reason and Other Writings in Moral Philosophy (1949); and Kant examined the whole question of the possibility of metaphysical knowledge in Critique of Pure Reason (1982; originally published in German, 4th ed., 1794), and Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forward as Science, trans. by Paul Carus (1902, rev. ed. 1977). For a sustained criticism of Kant’s critical point of view, see the writings of G.W.F. Hegel, especially The Phenomenology of Mind, 2nd ed. (1931, reissued 1977; originally published in German, 1807), The Logic of Hegel, trans. from the German by William Wallace (1873, reprinted with the title Hegel’s Logic, 1975), Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, 3 vol., ed. and trans. from the German by M.J. Petry (1970), and Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, trans. from the German by William Wallace, enlarged ed. (1971). These last three are translations from various editions of Hegel’s Encycklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, first published in 1817.

Only a few 19th-century philosophers added to the fundamental criticisms of metaphysics developed by earlier writers. See, for example, Auguste Comte, Cours de philosophie positive, 6 vol. (1830–42), available also in an edition of selections, ed. by Stanislav Andreski, The Essential Comte (1974); and John Stuart Mill, System of Logic, 2 vol. (1843, reissued 1978). Mill was sharply criticized by Thomas Hill Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, 5th ed. (1907, reprinted 1969); and F.H. Bradley, The Principles of Logic, 2nd ed. rev. (1922, reissued 1963).

For American metaphysical thought of the same period, see Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. by Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, and A.W. Burks, 8 vol. (1931–58, reissued in 4 vol., 1974–79); and William James, A Pluralistic Universe (1909, reprinted 1979).

There are interesting remarks on the philosophy of philosophy in the works of Wilhelm Dilthey, especially vol. 5 of his Gesammelte Schriften, 5th ed., 12 vol. (1962). Twentieth-century criticisms of metaphysics derive mainly from the work of the Vienna Circle; see Viktor Kraft, The Vienna Circle: The Origin of Neo-Positivism (1953, reissued 1969; originally published in German, 1950). Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922, reissued 1983), was read as an improved version of Empiricism. Among the authors who influenced the Logical Positivists were Ernst Mach, The Science of Mechanics: A Critical and Historical Accident of Its Development, 6th ed. (1974; originally published in German, 9th ed., 1933); Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, Principia Mathematica, 2nd ed., 3 vol. (1925–27, reprinted 1968–73); and Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World as a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy, rev. ed. (1926, reprinted 1972). A.J. Ayer (ed.), Logical Positivism (1959, reprinted 1978), anthologizes in translation some of the most famous papers from the Vienna Circle’s periodical Erkenntnis. Ayer’s own book, Language, Truth and Logic, 2nd ed. rev. (1946, reprinted 1970), was extremely successful in spreading Positivist ideas in America and Britain, where the work of George Edward Moore, especially “Defence of Common Sense,” in his Philosophical Papers, pp. 32–59 (1959, reprinted 1977), had created an atmosphere in which metaphysical claims were viewed with suspicion. Another influential book along the same lines as Ayer’s was Hans Reichenbach, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (1951, reprinted 1968); see also Morris Lazerowitz, The Structure of Metaphysics (1955, reprinted 1968), which attempts to explain the activities of metaphysicians in terms of psychoanalysis. For criticism of Positivist ideas, see Winston H.F. Barnes, The Philosophical Predicament (1950); D.F. Pears (ed.), The Nature of Metaphysics (1957, reprinted 1970); and Karl R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, 4th ed. rev. (1974). R.G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics (1940, reprinted 1979), purports to answer Ayer but instead contains an unconventional view of metaphysics as historical analysis. A division of metaphysical systems into “descriptive” and “revisionary” is proposed in P.F. Strawson, Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (1959, reprinted 1964). For further discussions, see W.H. Walsh, Metaphysics (1963, reprinted 1966); A.J. Ayer, Metaphysics and Common Sense (1969, reprinted 1973); Anthony Quinton, The Nature of Things (1973, reprinted 1978); Stephan Körner, Metaphysics, Its Structure and Function (1984); and D.W. Hamlyn, Metaphysics (1984). For a very different approach, compare Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics (1959, reissued 1961; originally published in German, 1953).

Recent European thought is summarized in Rüdiger Bubner, Modern German Philosophy (1981), trans. by Eric Matthew from an unpublished manuscript, which provides a critical survey of recent philosophy in Germany and compares it to philosophical work in the English-speaking world; Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy (1980; originally published in French, 1979), a survey of contemporary philosophy in France; and Alan Montefiori (ed.), Philosophy in France Today (1983), a collection of essays by French philosophers describing their own work and interests. André De Muralt, The Idea of Phenomenology: Husserlian Exemplarism (1974; originally published in French, 1958), studies the main themes in phenomenological philosophy. A useful introductory guide with an extensive bibliography is David Steward and Algis Mickunas, Exploring Phenomenology: A Guide to the Field and Its Literature (1974). Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction, 3rd rev. ed. (1982), discusses central themes in Phenomenology; and in The Context of the Phenomenological Movement (1981), he explains the background to that movement.

Karl-Otto Apel, Towards a Transformation of Philosophy (1980; originally published in German, 1972), is an influential study of objectivity, subjectivity, and interpretation. Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 2nd ed. (1978; originally published in German, 1968), is a critique of Positivism. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (1975, reissued 1982; originally published in German, 2nd ed., 1965), gives a Heideggerian account of the interpretation of experience. Another influential contribution to recent philosophy is Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (1969, reissued 1979; originally published in French, 1961).

Works that analyze the thought of specific philosophers include: R.E. Aquila, “Two Problems of Being and Nonbeing in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 28(2):167–186 (December 1977); Suzanne Bachelard, A Study of Husserl’s “Formal and Transcendental Logic” (1968; originally published in French, 1957); John D. Caputo, The Mystical Elements in Heidegger’s Thought (1978); Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s “Origin of Geometry”: An Introduction (1978; originally published in French, 2nd rev. ed., 1974); Joseph P. Fell, Heidegger and Sartre (1979); Wolfgang Walter Fuchs, Phenomenology and the Metaphysics of Presence: An Essay in the Philosophy of Edmund Husserl (1976); Agnes Heller (ed.), Lukács Reappraised (1983; U.K. title, Lukács Revalued); Sang-Ki Kim, The Problem of the Contingency of the World in Husserl’s Phenomenology (1977); A.M. Mirvish, “Merleau-Ponty and the Nature of Philosophy,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 43(4):449–476 (June 1983); Marie-Luise Schubert Kalsi, Alexius Meinong on Objects of Higher Order and Husserl’s Phenomenology (1978); and Anthony Thiselton, The Two Horizons: New Testament Hermeneutics and Philosophical Description with Special Reference to Heidegger, Bultmann, Gadamer, and Wittgenstein (1980). William Henry Walsh A.C. Grayling