Ebook: The Structure of Value: Foundations of Scientific Axiology

But Dr. Hartman has an ingenious logical point about the diremption between goodness and what may be called physical being, the being of fact: although the sciences studying them are separated as to subject matter, the basic concepts upon which these sciences depend are scarcely different at all: they have a definite logical relationship. To be a good x is not entirely other than being an x in the first place. It is almost as if Socrates in Republic VI were to have said that the illuminative sun is the idea of being, and that all vision depends upon it. At any rate, the near fusion of traditional metaphysics and axiology implied by this enables Professor Hartman, in his final chapter, to develop the theory of good as fundamental for a new organization of the sciences.