Meaning of speculative philosophy. Speculative philosophy 2019-01-25

What does speculative philosophy mean?

On this ground, and on this alone, a few autobiographical details are necessary, and may escape the charge of impertinence. But I do not think that anyone who is aware of the number and variety of such cases which have stood up to critical investigation could possibly regard this as a reasonable account of them taken collectively. He should remember, however, that an occasional dose of philosophic emetic or aperient may be wholesome, evcn though a regular diet of it is inadvisable. He would also have to explain, if he could, how it came about that the practicable and useful activity had been so intimately associated throughout the history of philosophy with the impracticable and spurious one. Or it may be that, before doing this, I deliberately banish to the margin of my consciousness my knowledge of the reasons for A and the reasons against B, and let the reversion from A to B take place in the temporary and superficial state of half-deception which I have deliberately created. Or Solopism- the doctrine that we have no proof that a world beyond our own experience even exists. As each new departrnent was considered it would be necessary to review the syntheses which had seemed fairly satisfactory at the previous level.

The Method of Speculative Philosophy (Publikation bei kassel university press)

In former times the method was often, ostensibly at any rate, deductive. As we all know, Mr. Their excesses tend towards wind-baggery which is what Schopenhauer accused Hegel of peddling. Since it is perfectly general, it applies equally to every system of Speculative Philosophy, and therefore gives us no ground for preferring one to another. The characteristic fault of Idealism is to be unable to see the trees for the wood, and the characteristic fault of Realism is to be unable to see the wood for the trees.

Critical and Speculative Philosophy

The latter seems to be the only hopeful course to take. In common usage, it sometimes carries the sense of unproductive or frivolous musings, but over the centuries it has produced some of the most important original thought, and its contribution to politics, sociology, mathematics, science and literature has been inestimable. He may find the whole thing a mass of tiresome and pretentious verbiage which merely darkens council. As one moves away from the physics, the value of science as a predictive method diminishes. The last question which I shall discuss is this.

Philosophy of history

This is true of the pin. One can be certain in the subjective sense, but be wrong, as either the theist or atheist one of them must be. But that is quite a different thing from theoretical certainty. Those who don't care about evidence do not it seems to me care about truth. The term may be employed in two quite different senses: it may mean 1 the events and actions that together make up the human past, or 2 the accounts given of that past and the modes of investigation whereby they are arrived at or constructed.

Philosophy of history

Can we be pretty sure the world is more round, than square or flat? The attraction of the sublimative type of unification lies partly in the fact that all value and disvalue of every kind seems to reside in the higher levels. But neither of these activities is a substitute for the other; and a genuine Speculative Philosophy must combine the detailed study of the lower categories with the due recognition of the higher categories, and must try to reconcile the pervasiveness of the former with the apparently growing importance of the latter. In Leibniz's monadology there are at least two instances of it. The notion of philosophical reflection upon history and its nature is consequently open to more than one interpretation, and modern writers have found it convenient to regard it as covering two main types of undertaking. People, it seems, do not want to hear the word maybe anymore. It seems prima facie that each of us conducts one part of his life on the assumption of complete determinism and another part on the assumption of incomplete determinism plus something else more positive which it is very hard to formulate clearly.

SOME METHODS OF SPECULATIVE PHILOSOPHY

I agree with you that the Cartesian idea of deductive metaphysics is wrong. Should philosophical speculations have the same requirements? This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form. It leads us to two conclusions. Thus logic deals with the most fundamental of all concepts, and with those a priori principles which form the connective tissue of all knowledge. Finally, we are in a position to estimate the kind and degree of evidence which there is for such assumptions. I shall therefore begin by mentioning some of the books which and the men who have specially influenced me, and by enumerating those hereditary and acquired tendencies which are likely to have biassed my philosophical views.

Critical and Speculative Philosophy

So far as the notion of acting and being acted upon survives in physics, the physicist thinks of one system as acting on another when energy is transferred from the former to the latter, or when the former, without doing work on the latter, modifies the direction of motion of some of its parts by fixed constraints. To explain your subjective feeling of certainty, we would need psychology, since we are talking about feelings. But there are other propositions of which we cannot see either that they are or that they an not necessary, though they must of course be in fact one or the other. Why is there a problem? In the meanwhile I devoured eagerly all Dr. There is a problem of sense-perception, in the philosophical sense, for those and only those who try to envisage all these fact together and to interpret sense-perception and its implications in relation to all of them. Also, as we have seen, it is often held that science shows that human beings are conscious automata. It is more reasonable to believe strongly that I shall be ill if I swallow arsenic than to believe strongly that a conjuror has really pounded my watch in a mortar and restored it to me, although I seem to have seen him do so.

Critical and Speculative Philosophy

I could quite easily be taken in by an inferior performer on their lyre, but I think I could see through second-rate science or inferior epigrammatic poetry. On the other hand, we know of no external artificer of whom we can say that he, in fact, constructed and is trying to maintain this cat or that oak-tree in accordance with an idea and a desire in his mind. The role allowed to reason has been confined to the interpretation of brute facts and the material aspect of reality. Perhaps the most basic overall split at the highest level is geographical, between and with, arguably, as a possible third branch at this level. Here again the need for synopsis is evident.

Speculative

And they certainly suggest prima facie the continued existence, intellectual activity, and planned action of certain definite individuals after the death of their bodies. In dreams we have visual experiences very much like those of normal waking life, but it is evident that they occur without the eye being stimulated by light from an external object as in normal visual perception. In making such statements I am, of course, referring to present-day philosophers who are really capable of appreciating and continuing the work of their predecessors. The main facts are these. This entails that it cannot contribute to cause any event that preceded it.