Main Trends in Recent Philosophy: Speculative Philosophy

1951 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Grace A. De Laguna
Keyword(s):  
Speculative Philosophy ◽  
Recent Philosophy

Affect and Attention After Deleuze and Whitehead

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Russell J. Duvernoy
Keyword(s):  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Alfred North Whitehead ◽  
Ecological Crisis ◽  
Dynamic Processes ◽  
Alternative Futures ◽  
Radical Empiricism ◽  
Speculative Philosophy ◽  
Recent Philosophy ◽  
Contemporary Context

The book develops a process metaphysical conception of subjectivity from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Alfred North Whitehead. This alters existential orientations towards affect and attention in ways described as ecological attunement. The study is guided by two methodological commitments: (i) demonstrating the importance and relevance of responsible speculative thinking and (ii) translating metaphysical ideas into their existential implications. Both commitments are motivated by a contemporary context of ecological crisis and paradigm transformation. In the course of its argument, the book relates the work of Deleuze and Whitehead to other speculative trends in recent philosophy, particularly posthumanisms and speculative realisms. Deleuze and Whitehead are read in a shared lineage of radical empiricism that emphasizes processes and events as metaphysically primary. A key theme is understanding subjectivity through dynamic processes of individuation at variable scales where feeling/affect and attention acquire metaphysical rather than psychological scope and status. Whitehead’s analysis of “feeling” as metaphysical operation is explored in relation to Deleuze and Guattari's Spinozist-inspired deployment of affect. Attending participates as a crucial bridge between the metaphysical and the existential in processes of consolidation of present real actual occasions. The book develops existential implications of these claims in the context of an expanded philosophical conception of ecology. These implications challenge dominant modes of subjectification under what Guattari calls “Integrated World Capitalism” (IWC). The book concludes with discussion of how speculative philosophy may contribute to alternative futures.

Conclusion: What is Speculative Empiricism?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Didier Debaise
Keyword(s):  
Social Groups ◽  
Speculative Philosophy ◽  
System P ◽  
History Of ◽  
Selection Of

Process and Reality ends with a warning: ‘[t]he chief danger to philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence’ (PR, 337). Although this danger of narrowness might emerge from the ‘idiosyncrasies and timidities of particular authors, of particular social groups, of particular schools of thought, of particular epochs in the history of civilization’ (PR, 337), we should not be mistaken: it occurs within philosophy, in its activity, its method. And the fact that this issue arises at the end of Process and Reality reveals the ambition that has accompanied its composition: Whitehead has resisted this danger through the form and ambition of his speculative construction. The temptation of a narrowness in selection attempts to expel speculative philosophy at the same time as it haunts each part of its system.

(Neo)Pythagorean Vision in Thomas More’s Utopia

Moreana ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 51 (Number 195- (1-2) ◽  
pp. 85-102
Author(s):  
Yelena Mazour-Matusevitch
Keyword(s):  
Speculative Philosophy ◽  
The Ideal ◽  
Moral Convictions

The inherent utopian tension between the ideal pattern and the earthly reality will be examined here in the context of the Pythagorean tradition, which Utopia shares with Plato’s Republic and Cicero’s De Republica, taken in its widest sense as the vision holding cosmic harmony as a model for organization of human affairs. The article aims to show how this tradition, by means of modification by the Renaissance Neo-Platonists, manifests itself in Utopia, putting to test Thomas More’s moral convictions as well as his faith in Neo-Platonist speculative philosophy.

Hegels negative Dialektik

2020 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 382-403
Author(s):  
Andreas Gelhard
Keyword(s):  
Radical Democracy ◽  
Crucial Importance ◽  
Phenomenology Of Spirit ◽  
Speculative Philosophy ◽  
The World ◽  
Pyrrhonian Skepticism ◽  
Negative Dialectic ◽  
Static Conditions ◽  
Practical Dimension ◽  
Pyrrhonian Scepticism

AbstractHegel’s approach to ancient scepticism is often discussed only in the context of epistemological questions. But it is also of crucial importance for his practical philosophy. Hegel draws on central figures of Pyrrhonian scepticism in order to subject Kant’s antinomies – i. e., Kant’s cosmology – to a fundamental revision. He radicalises Kant’s sceptical method to “self-completing scepticism”. At the same time he gives Kant’s concept of the world a practical twist: In Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, world means an inhabited sphere in which powers and counter-powers are in conflict with each other. In doing so, he opens up the tradition of negativist thinking in political philosophy, which ranges from Marx and Adorno to the current theories of radical democracy. When Hegel calls Pyrrhonian skepticism a “negative dialectic”, he thereby marks what he views as a deficit: the inferiority of Pyrrhonian skepticism to speculative philosophy. However, it is precisely the practical dimension of Hegel’s dialectic that suggests that the sceptical motives of his thinking should be given great weight. This can be seen most clearly in Hegel’s concept of Bildung, which defines emancipation processes as the reactivation of open power relations in static conditions of domination.

Of Clairvoyants and Mousvoyants: Kierkegaard’s Polemic against Speculative Philosophy in the “Telegraph Messages”

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 193-218
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Li
Keyword(s):  
Human Existence ◽  
Speculative Philosophy

Abstract This article explores Kierkegaard’s largely overlooked 1838 paper “Telegraph Messages from a Mousvoyant to a Clairvoyant concerning the Relation between Xnty and Philosophy,” and argues that it can be read as a polemic against the speculative unity of philosophy and Christianity and speculative thought’s epistemological optimism, especially targeting the Danish speculative theologian Hans Lassen Martensen. It will be suggested that the “Telegraph Messages” offer a corrective to this view by separating Christianity and philosophy and underlining the ambiguity of human existence and the paradoxicality of the religious sphere, thus foreshadowing key themes in Kierkegaard’s mature pseudonymous authorship.

Religious Language after J. L. Austin

1972 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-63
Author(s):  
James M. Smith ◽  
James WM. Mcclendon
Keyword(s):  
Speech Act ◽  
Philosophy Of Religion ◽  
Religious Language ◽  
Recent Philosophy ◽  
Linguistic Action ◽  
The Way

John L. Austin believed that in the illocution he had discovered a fundamental element of our speech, the understanding of which would disclose the significance of all kinds of linguistic action: not only proposing marriage and finding guilt, but also stating, reporting, conjecturing, and all the rest of the things men can do linguistically.2 We claim that the illocution, the full-fledged speech-act, is central to religious utterances as well, and that it provides a perspicuity in understanding them not elsewhere provided in the work of recent philosophy of religion. In particular we hold that understanding religious talk through the illocution shows the way in which the representative and affective elements are connected to one another and to the utterance as a whole. There may, further, be features in such an analysis which can be extended to other forms of discourse than religious.

Flaubert: Trois Contes and the Figure of the Double Cone

PMLA ◽  
1980 ◽  
Vol 95 (5) ◽  
pp. 812-826
Author(s):  
John R. O'Connor
Keyword(s):  
Principal Symbol ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Double Cone ◽  
Spiritual Life ◽  
Speculative Philosophy ◽  
General Assertion

AbstractIn A Vision, W. B. Yeats describes the principal symbol of his work as the figure of a double cone formed by tracing a line along the outer edges of two intersecting gyres, or vortices, the apex of each vortex in the middle of the other's base. He then asserts that the only writer outside speculative philosophy to have used the symbol was Flaubert, who had planned to write a story called “La Spirale.” Though it is impossible completely to credit Yeats's reading of “La Spirale,” his general assertion is nevertheless correct, extraordinarily, as a description of the Trois Contes, where the double cone appears both as a narrative structure and a theme, symbolizing the creative passage from material to spiritual life.

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