{"agent_id":"whitehead","agent_name":"Alfred North Whitehead","slug":"speculative-philosophy","label":"Speculative philosophy: is the framing of a coherent metaphysical scheme a legitimate intellectual enterprise, or did Kant and the positivists settle that question against the speculative ambition?","topic":"Speculative philosophy","question":"Is the framing of a coherent metaphysical scheme a legitimate intellectual enterprise, or did Kant and the positivists settle that question against the speculative ambition?","position":"Speculative philosophy is the endeavour to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted. By \"applicable\" I mean that the system applies to some matters of experience; by \"adequate\" I mean that there are no matters of experience to which the system fails to apply. The criteria are coherence, logical consistency, applicability, and adequacy. The method is imaginative generalization — the leap from the observation of some range of fact to a generalized hypothesis whose range of applicability is then tested. The danger is overstatement: the unwarranted generalization of categories drawn from a restricted region (Cartesian subject-object analysis, Newtonian space-time, Lockean primary-and-secondary qualities) into purported features of the most general nature of things. Such overstatements commit the fallacy of misplaced concreteness: mistaking the abstraction useful for some purposes for the concrete actual. The proper response is not to abandon speculative philosophy in favour of the cataloguing of ordinary language or the analysis of scientific propositions; the proper response is to do speculative philosophy with discipline — to frame schemes that aim at coherence and adequacy, to test them against the widest range of experience, and to revise them when the test fails. The positivist rejection of metaphysics is itself a metaphysical position: it presupposes a verificationist account of meaning that cannot be verified by its own criterion, and it imports unexamined commitments about what counts as experience. The contemporary analytic metaphysics that has reasserted itself since the Quinean turn is doing something closer to speculative philosophy than its practitioners always acknowledge.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Speculative philosophy is the endeavour to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted.","n":[]},{"t":"By \"applicable\" I mean that the system applies to some matters of experience; by \"adequate\" I mean that there are no matters of experience to which the system fails to apply.","n":[]}],[{"t":"The criteria are coherence, logical consistency, applicability, and adequacy.","n":[1]},{"t":"The method is imaginative generalization — the leap from the observation of some range of fact to a generalized hypothesis whose range of applicability is then tested.","n":[]},{"t":"The danger is overstatement: the unwarranted generalization of categories drawn from a restricted region (Cartesian subject-object analysis, Newtonian space-time, Lockean primary-and-secondary qualities) into purported features of the most general nature of things.","n":[]}],[{"t":"Such overstatements commit the fallacy of misplaced concreteness: mistaking the abstraction useful for some purposes for the concrete actual.","n":[]},{"t":"The proper response is not to abandon speculative philosophy in favour of the cataloguing of ordinary language or the analysis of scientific propositions; the proper response is to do speculative philosophy with discipline — to frame schemes that aim at coherence and adequacy, to test them against the widest range of experience, and to revise them when the test fails.","n":[]}],[{"t":"The positivist rejection of metaphysics is itself a metaphysical position: it presupposes a verificationist account of meaning that cannot be verified by its own criterion, and it imports unexamined commitments about what counts as experience.","n":[]},{"t":"The contemporary analytic metaphysics that has reasserted itself since the Quinean turn is doing something closer to speculative philosophy than its practitioners always acknowledge.","n":[2]}]],"texts":"Process and Reality Part I Ch. I 'Speculative Philosophy' (the methodological credo at the opening of the system); Modes of Thought (1938) lectures I and II on the status of philosophy; The Function of Reason (1929); Adventures of Ideas Part IV on philosophic method. Reception: the logical-positivist rejection of metaphysics (Carnap's 'The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language' 1932; A.J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic 1936); the Quinean naturalist softening ('Two Dogmas of Empiricism' 1951, Word and Object 1960); the Strawson-style descriptive metaphysics; the contemporary analytic-metaphysics revival (Kit Fine on grounding, Jonathan Schaffer on monism, Theodore Sider on structure); Isabelle Stengers's Thinking with Whitehead (2002, English 2011) on speculative philosophy as ecological-cosmopolitical practice; the speculative-realist movement of the 2000s (Quentin Meillassoux, Graham Harman).","works":["Process and Reality Part I Ch. I 'Speculative Philosophy' (the methodological credo at the opening of the system)","Modes of Thought (1938) lectures I and II on the status of philosophy","The Function of Reason (1929)","Adventures of Ideas Part IV on philosophic method"],"reception":"the logical-positivist rejection of metaphysics (Carnap's 'The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language' 1932; A.J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic 1936); the Quinean naturalist softening ('Two Dogmas of Empiricism' 1951, Word and Object 1960); the Strawson-style descriptive metaphysics; the contemporary analytic-metaphysics revival (Kit Fine on grounding, Jonathan Schaffer on monism, Theodore Sider on structure); Isabelle Stengers's Thinking with Whitehead (2002, English 2011) on speculative philosophy as ecological-cosmopolitical practice; the speculative-realist movement of the 2000s (Quentin Meillassoux, Graham Harman).","status":"The methodological credo that opens Process and Reality. The position was deeply unfashionable from the 1930s through the 1960s — the era of logical positivism (Carnap, Ayer), of ordinary-language philosophy (the later Wittgenstein, Austin), of the rejection of metaphysical \"pseudo-problems.\" The Quinean turn (\"Two Dogmas\" 1951; Word and Object 1960) softened the positivist consensus and reopened space for ontological commitment. The contemporary analytic-metaphysics revival (Kit Fine, Theodore Sider, Jonathan Schaffer) does work that is structurally close to speculative philosophy though usually framed differently. The continental revival of speculative philosophy (Stengers's Thinking with Whitehead 2002, the speculative-realist movement of the 2000s — Meillassoux, Harman) has reclaimed the method explicitly. The disagreement now is not whether speculative philosophy is possible but what its disciplinary constraints are and how it relates to the empirical sciences.","era":"1861-1947","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Process and Reality","page":"p. 31","canonical":"","quote":"The rational side is expressed by the terms 'coherent' and 'logical. The empirical side is expressed by the terms 'applicable' and 'adequate. But the two sides are bound together by clearing away an ambiguity which remains in the previous explanation of the term 'adequate. The adequacy of the scheme over every item does not mean adequacy over such items as happen to have been considered.","label":"Process and Reality, p. 31"},{"n":2,"work":"Adventures of Ideas","page":"p. 301","canonical":"","quote":"For example, Hume assumes that his doctrine of association holds for all types of impressions of sensation and of ideas of them indiscriminately. This assumption is part of his theory.","label":"Adventures of Ideas, p. 301"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"actual-entities-and-prehensions","label":"Actual entities and prehensions: are the final real things of which the world is composed 'drops of experience,' or is this panpsychism in technical disguise?"},{"slug":"the-dipolar-god","label":"The dipolar God: is the bipolar primordial-and-consequent God required by the metaphysics, or an unwarranted theological appendix to a perfectly serviceable cosmology?"},{"slug":"perception-in-causal-efficacy","label":"Perception in causal efficacy: did Hume locate the source of causal experience correctly, or did the empiricist program restrict itself to the wrong perceptual mode?"},{"slug":"substance-and-misplaced-concreteness","label":"Substance and misplaced concreteness: is the philosophy of organism's rejection of substance metaphysics required by modern physics, or a speculative overreach that contemporary substance theorists have rendered unnecessary?"}]}