I outline the theoretical framework of, and three research programs within American speculative philosophy of science during the period 1900-1931. One program applies verificationism to research in psychology, one investigates the methodology of research programs, and one analyses scientific explanation and other scientific concepts. The primary sources for my outline are works by Morris Raphael Cohen, Grace Andrus de Laguna, Theodore de Laguna, Edgar Arthur Singer Jr., Harold Robert Smart, and Marie Collins Swabey. I also use my outline (...) to provide a partial comparison of American speculative philosophy of science and 1930s logical positivism. My comparison suggests that logical positivism was a proposal for substantially narrowing down and winding back American philosophy of science and was based on positions that were already problematized in the American context. -/- . (shrink)

I respond to the commentaries on 'Grace de Laguna's Analytic and Speculative Philosophy' offered by Peter Olen [2023], Trevor Pearce, Anthony Fisher, Marguerite La Caze and Frederique Janssen-Lauret. In doing so, I bring out some of the value of de Laguna’s perspectivism and of her treatment of modality. I also further clarify how she departs from pragmatism and from analytic philosophy, and how she relates to continental philosophy.

This paper introduces the philosophy of Grace Andrus de Laguna in order to renew interest in it. I show that, in the 1910s and 1920s, she develops ideas and arguments that are also found playing key roles in the development of analytic philosophy decades later. Further, I describe her sympathetic, but acute, criticism of pragmatism and Heideggerian ontology, and situate her work in the tradition of American, speculative philosophy. Before 1920, we will see, de Laguna appeals (...) to multiple realizability to undermine reductionism in science, to support perspectival, scientific realism and, with help from a private language argument, to favour the view that mental states are classified by behavioural, teleological roles over what came to be called ‘type physicalism’. Her view of speech, mostly developed in the 1920s, tells us that its primary role is coordinating group behaviour rather than expressing thoughts. Belief is understood in terms of its causal role, including its causal relations to other kinds of mental states, when coordinating group behaviour. Thought is similarly understood. In developing her theory of mind, de Laguna rejects the pragmatist claims that belief can be reduced to dispositions to behaviour and that thought’s function is to address specific, rather than general, problems. She also favours meaning holism and rejects the analytic–synthetic distinction. In later work, de Laguna argues that individuals’ activity of self-maintenance brings universals, conceived of as irreducible potentialities, into being and makes them increasingly determinate. Further, she identifies the existence of all individuals with forms of self-maintenance and takes the existence of people to include maintenance of the cultural world. Such a unified treatment of existence, she holds, permits making its evolution intelligible. Heidegger’s view of being is rejected for not permitting this. All de Laguna’s work, we will see, fits a vision of philosophy as the systematic, imaginative and naturalistic examination of being as well as a source of criticism of science. (shrink)

This paper contributes to explaining the rise of logical empiricism in mid-twentieth century (North) America and to a better understanding of American philosophy of science before the dominance of logical empiricism. We show that, contrary to a number of existing histories, philosophy of science was already a distinct subfield of philosophy, one with its own approaches and issues, even before logical empiricists arrived in America. It was a form of speculative philosophy with a concern for (...) speculative metaphysics, normative issues relating to science and society and issues which later were associated with logical empiricist philosophy of science, issues such as confirmation, scientific explanation, reductionism and laws of nature. Further, philosophy of science was not primarily pragmatist in orientation. We also show, with the help of our historical characterization, that a recent account of the emergence of analytic philosophy applies to the rise of logical empiricism. It has been argued that the emergence of American analytic philosophy is partly explained by analytic philosophers’ use of key institutions, including of journals, to marginalize speculative philosophy and promote analytic philosophy. We argue that this use of institutions included the marginalization of speculative and value-laden philosophy of science and the promotion of logical empiricism. (shrink)

This is a collection of essays from contemporary philosophers, artists, and writers on the intersection of speculative philosophy and speculative horror fiction. The book contains fourteen essays and an introduction. I edited the book and wrote the introduction. Topics considered include human extinction; anonymity, otherness, and alienation; whether horror is a genre; and the relationship between speculation and Kant’s critical philosophy.

Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Leslie White, Allen Johnson and Timothy Earle, and Stephen Sanderson all produced some of the more interesting theories of history, social change and cultural evolution but their theories have a common deficiency. None of them provide an ultimate explanation for social, cultural and historical change. This failure was rectified by J. S. Mill who suggested increasing human knowledge was the ultimate cause of social, cultural and historical change. However even Mill did not ask what caused the (...) increasing human knowledge and why the knowledge had to be acquired in a particular order and how this could affect human history. (shrink)

This paper suggests ever increasing human knowledge of the world around us is the driving force for much social and cultural evolution. It examines the order of discovery of our knowledge of the world around us and notes this knowledge comes to us in a particular and necessary order from the easiest to discover to the more difficult to discover. The necessary order of the discoveries means they can be rationally analysed and understood and this enables the study of social (...) and cultural evolution to be put on a scientific basis. It also enables us to make scientifically based predictions about the future for the human species. (shrink)

While some philosophers and increasing numbers of scientists are striving to revive speculative metaphysics as a condition for further advancing science, solving the central problems of contemporary philosophy and confronting the major problems facing society, even philosophers decrying the increasingly marginal status of philosophy continue to ignore or denigrate their efforts. It is argued that this lack of appreciation and the associated misrepresentations of speculative metaphysics stems from the failure to appreciate work in this area as (...) an ongoing tradition among historians and historically oriented philosophers of science and philosopher scientists. Most importantly, it stems from ignorance of Whitehead's defence of speculative metaphysics against analytic philosophy and the impact of this defence on the tradition of speculative metaphysics. Whitehead's metaphilosophy is analysed as a successful refutation of the assumptions on which Russell's early analytic approach to philosophy was based, assumptions which came to inform the whole tradition of analytic philosophy. The paper concludes by indicating the importance of Whitehead's defence of speculative metaphysics not only for philosophy, but also for the future of society. (shrink)

continent. 1.1 : 3-13. / 0/ – Introduction I want to propose, as a trajectory into the philosophically weird, an absurd theoretical claim and pursue it, or perhaps more accurately, construct it as I point to it, collecting the ground work behind me like the Perpetual Train from China Mieville's Iron Council which puts down track as it moves reclaiming it along the way. The strange trajectory is the following: Kant's critical philosophy and much of continental philosophy which (...) has followed, has been a defense against horror and madness. Kant's prohibition on speculative metaphysics such as dogmatic metaphysics and transcendental realism, on thinking beyond the imposition of transcendental and moral constraints, has been challenged by numerous figures proceeding him. One of the more interesting critiques of Kant comes from the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land stating, “Kant’s critical philosophy is the most elaborate fit of panic in the history of the Earth.” And while Alain Badiou would certainly be opposed to the libidinal investments of Land's Deleuzo-Guattarian thought, he is likewise critical of Kant's normative thought-bureaucracies: Kant is the one author for whom I cannot feel any kinship. Everything in him exasperates me, above all his legalism—always asking Quid Juris? Or ‘Haven’t you crossed the limit?’—combined, as in today’s United States, with a religiosity that is all the more dismal in that it is both omnipresent and vague. The critical machinery he set up has enduringly poisoned philosophy, while giving great succour to the academy, which loves nothing more than to rap the knuckles of the overambitious [….] That is how I understand the truth of Monique David-Menard’s reflections on the properly psychotic origins of Kantianism. I am persuaded that the whole of the critical enterprise is set up to to shield against the tempting symptom represented by the seer Swedenborg, or against ‘diseases of the head’, as Kant puts it. An entire nexus of the limits of reason and philosophy are set up here, namely that the critical philosophy not only defends thought from madness, philosophy from madness, and philosophy from itself, but that philosophy following the advent of the critical enterprise philosophy becomes auto-vampiric; feeding on itself to support the academy. Following Francois Laruelle's non-philosophical indictment of philosophy, we could go one step further and say that philosophy operates on the material of what is philosophizable and not the material of the external world. [1] Beyond this, the Kantian scheme of nestling human thinking between our limited empirical powers and transcendental guarantees of categorical coherence, forms of thinking which stretch beyond either appear illegitimate, thereby liquefying both pre-critical metaphysics and the ravings of the mad in the same critical acid. In rejecting the Kantian apparatus we are left with two entities – an unsure relation of thought to reality where thought is susceptible to internal and external breakdown and a reality with an uncertain sense of stability. These two strands will be pursued, against the sane-seal of post-Kantian philosophy by engaging the work of weird fiction authors H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti. The absolute inhumanism of the formers universe will be used to describe a Shoggothic Materialism while the dream worlds of the latter will articulate the mad speculation of a Ventriloquil Idealism. But first we must address the relation of philosophy to madness as well as philosophy to weird fiction. /1/ – Philosophy and Madness There is nothing that the madness of men invents which is not either nature made manifest or nature restored. Michel Foucault. Madness and Civilization. The moment I doubt whether an event that I recall actually took place, I bring the suspicion of madness upon myself: unless I am uncertain as to whether it was not a mere dream. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Idea, Vol. 3. Madness is commonly thought of as moving through several well known cultural-historical shifts from madness as a demonic or otherwise theological force, to rationalization, to medicalization psychiatric and otherwise. Foucault's Madness and Civilization is well known for orientating madness as a form of exclusionary social control which operated by demarcating madness from reason. Yet Foucault points to the possibility of madness as the necessity of nature at least prior to the crushing weight of the church. Kant’s philosophy as a response to madness is grounded by his humanizing of madness itself. As Adrian Johnston points out in the early pages of Time Driven pre-Kantian madness meant humans were seized by demonic or angelic forces whereas Kantian madness became one of being too human. Madness becomes internalized, the external demonic forces become flaws of the individual mind. Foucault argues that, while madness is de-demonized it is also dehumanized during the Renaissance, as madmen become creatures neither diabolic nor totally human reduced to the zero degree of humanity. It is immediately clear why for Kant, speculative metaphysics must be curbed – with the problem of internal madness and without the external safeguards of transcendental conditions, there is nothing to formally separate the speculative capacities for metaphysical diagnosis from the mad ramblings of the insane mind – both equally fall outside the realm of practicality and quotidian experience. David-Menard's work is particularly useful in diagnosing the relation of thought and madness in Kant's texts. David-Menard argues that in Kant's relatively unknown “An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” as well as his later discussion of the Seer of Swedenborg, that Kant formulates madness primarily in terms of sensory upheaval or other hallucinatory theaters. She writes: “madness is an organization of thought. It is made possible by the ambiguity of the normal relation between the imaginary and the perceived, whether this pertains to the order of sensation or to the relations between our ideas” Kant's fascination with the Seer forces Kant between the pincers of “aesthetic reconciliation” – namely melancholic withdrawal – and “a philosophical invention” – namely the critical project. Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis is a combination and reversal of Kant's split, where an aesthetic over engagement with the world entails prolific conceptual invention. Their embrace of madness, however, is of course itself conceptual despite all their rhizomatic maneuvers. Though they move with the energy of madness, Deleuze and Guattari save the capacity of thought from the fangs of insanity by imbuing materiality itself with the capacity for thought. Or, as Ray Brassier puts it, “Deleuze insists, it is necessary to absolutize the immanence of this world in such a way as to dissolve the transcendent disjunction between things as we know them and as they are in themselves”. That is, whereas Kant relied on the faculty of judgment to divide representation from objectivity Deleuze attempts to flatten the whole economy beneath the juggernaut of ontological univocity. Speculation, as a particularly useful form of madness, might fall close to Deleuze and Guattari’s shaping of philosophy into a concept producing machine but is different in that it is potentially self destructive – less reliant on the stability of its own concepts and more adherent to exposing a particular horrifying swath of reality. Speculative madness is always a potential disaster in that it acknowledges little more than its own speculative power with the hope that the gibbering of at least a handful of hysterical brains will be useful. Pre-critical metaphysics amounts to madness, though this may be because the world itself is mad while new attempts at speculative metaphysics, at post-Kantian pre-critical metaphysics, are well aware of our own madness. Without the sobriety of the principle of sufficient reason we have a world of neon madness: “we would have to conceive what our life would be if all the movements of the earth, all the noises of the earth, all the smells, the tastes, all the light – of the earth and elsewhere, came to us in a moment, in an instant – like an atrocious screaming tumult of things”. Speculative thought may be participatory in the screaming tumult of the world or, worse yet, may produce its spectral double. Against theology or reason or simply commonsense, the speculative becomes heretical. Speculation, as the cognitive extension of the horrorific sublime should be met with melancholic detachment. Whereas Kant's theoretical invention, or productivity of thought, is self -sabotaging, since the advent of the critical project is a productivity of thought which then delimits the engine of thought at large either in dogmatic gestures or non-systematizable empirical wondrousness. The former is celebrated by the fiction of Thomas Ligotti whereas the latter is espoused by the tales of H.P. Lovecraft. /2/ – Weird Fiction and Philosophy. Supernatural horror, in all its eerie constructions, enables a reader to taste treats inconsistent with his personal welfare. Thomas Ligotti Songs of a Dead Dreamer. I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve,momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis H.P. Lovecraft. “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” Lovecraft states that his creation of a story is to suspend natural law yet, at the same time, he indexes the tenuousness of such laws, suggesting the vast possibilities of the cosmic. The tension that Lovecraft sets up between his own fictions and the universe or nature is reproduced within his fictions in the common theme of the unreliable narrator; unreliable precisely because they are either mad or what they have witnessed questions the bounds of material reality. In “The Call of Cthulhu” Lovecraft writes: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. Despite Lovecraft's invocations of illusion, he is not claiming that his fantastic creations such as the Old Ones are supernatural but, following Joshi, are only ever supernormal. One can immediately see that instead of nullifying realism Lovecraft in fact opens up the real to an unbearable degree. In various letters and non-fictional statements Lovecraft espoused strictly materialist tenets, ones which he borrowed from Hugh Elliot namely the uniformity of law, the denial of teleology and the denial of non-material existence. Lovecraft seeks to explore the possibilities of such a universe by piling horror upon horror until the fragile brain which attempts to grasp it fractures. This may be why philosophy has largely ignored weird fiction – while Deleuze and Guattari mark the turn towards weird fiction and Lovecraft in particular, with the precursors to speculative realism as well as contemporary related thinkers have begun to view Lovecraft as making philosophical contributions. Lovecraft's own relation to philosophy is largely critical while celebrating Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. This relationship of Lovecraft to philosophy and philosophy to Lovecraft is coupled with Lovecraft's habit of mercilessly destroying the philosopher and the figure of the academic more generally in his work, a destruction which is both an epistemological destruction and an ontological destruction. Thomas Ligotti's weird fiction which he has designated as a kind of “confrontational escapism” might be best described in the following quote from one of his shortstories, “The human phenomenon is but the sum of densely coiled layers of illusion each of which winds itself on the supreme insanity. That there are persons of any kind when all there can be is mindless mirrors laughing and screaming as they parade about in an endless dream”. Whereas Lovecraft's weirdness draws predominantly from the abyssal depths of the uncharted universe, Ligotti's existential horror focuses on the awful proliferation of meaningless surfaces that is, the banal and every day function of representation. In an interview, Ligotti states: We don't even know what the world is like except through our sense organs, which are provably inadequate. It's no less the case with our brains. Our whole lives are motored along by forces we cannot know and perceptions that are faulty. We sometimes hear people say that they're not feeling themselves. Well, who or what do they feel like then? This is not to say that Ligotti sees nothing beneath the surface but that there is only darkness or blackness behind it, whether that surface is on the cosmological level or the personal. By addressing the implicit and explicit philosophical issues in Ligotti's work we will see that his nightmarish take on reality is a form of malevolent idealism, an idealism which is grounded in a real, albeit dark and obscure materiality. If Ligotti's horrors ultimately circle around mad perceptions which degrade the subject, it takes aim at the vast majority of the focus of continental philosophy. While Lovecraft's acidic materialism clearly assaults any romantic concept of being from the outside, Ligotti attacks consciousness from the inside: Just a little doubt slipped into the mind, a little trickle of suspicion in the bloodstream, and all those eyes of ours, one by one, open up to the world and see its horror [...] Not even the solar brilliance of a summer day will harbor you from horror. For horror eats the light and digests it into darkness. Clearly, the weird fiction of Lovecraft and Ligotti amount to a anti-anthrocentric onslaught against the ramparts of correlationist continental philosophy. /3/ – Shoggothic Materialism or the Formless Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes—viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells—rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile—slaves of suggestion, builders of cities—more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative—Great God! What madness made even those blasphemous Old Ones willing to use and to carve such things? H.P. Lovecraft. “At the Mountains of Madness” On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit. Georges Bataille. “Formless”. The Shoggoths feature most prominently in H.P. Lovecraft's shortstory “At the Mountains of Madness” where they are described in the following manner: It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train – a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self -luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. The term is a litmus test for materialism itself as the Shoggoth is an amorphous creature. The Shoggoths were living digging machines bio engineered by the Elder Things, and their protoplasmic bodies being formed into various tools by their hypnotic powers. The Shoggoths eventually became self aware and rose up against their masters in an ultimately failed rebellion. After the Elder Ones retreated into the oceans leaving the Shoggoths to roam the frozen wastes of the Antarctic. The onto-genesis of the Shoggoths and their gross materiality, index the horrifyingly deep time of the earth a concept near and dear to Lovecraft's formulation of horror as well as the fear of intelligences far beyond, and far before, the ascent of humankind on earth and elsewhere. The sickly amorphous nature of the Shoggoths invade materialism at large, where while materiality is unmistakably real ie not discursive, psychological, or otherwise overly subjectivist, it questions the relation of materialism to life. As Eugene Thacker writes: The Shoggoths or Elder Things do not even share the same reality with the human beings who encounter them—and yet this encounter takes place, though in a strange no-place that is neither quite that of the phenomenal world of the human subject or the noumenal world of an external reality. Amorphous yet definitively material beings are a constant in Lovecraft's tales. In his tale “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadatth” Lovecraft describes Azathoth as, “that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe,” that, “last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blashphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity,” who, “gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time”. Azathoth's name may have multiple origins but the most striking is the alchemy term azoth which is both a cohesive agent and a acidic creation pointing back to the generative and the decayed. The indistinction of generation and degradation materially mirrors the blur between the natural and the unnatural as well as life and non-life. Lovecraft speaks of the tension between the natural and the unnatural is his short story “The Unnameable.” He writes, “if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulousity as the spectre of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against Nature?”. Lovecraft explores exactly the tension outlined at the beginning of this chapter, between life and thought. At the end of his short tale Lovecraft compounds the problem as the unnameable is described as “a gelatin—a slime—yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory”. Deleuze suggests that becoming-animal is operative throughout Lovecraft's work, where narrators feel themselves reeling at their becoming non-human or of being the anomalous or of becoming atomized. Following Eugene Thacker however, it may be far more accurate to say that Lovecraft's tales exhibit not a becoming-animal but a becoming-creature. Where the monstrous breaks the purportedly fixed laws of nature, the creature is far more ontologically ambiguous. The nameless thing is an altogether different horizon for thought. The creature is either less than animal or more than animal – its becoming is too strange for animal categories and indexes the slow march of thought towards the bizarre. This strangeness is, as aways, some indefinite swirling in the category of immanence and becoming. Bataille begins “The Labyrinth” with the assertion that being, to continue to be, is becoming. More becoming means more being hence the assertion that Bataille's barking dog is more than the sponge. This would mean that the Shoggotth is altogether too much being, too much material in the materialism. Bataille suggests that there is an immanence between the eater and the eaten, across the species and never within them. That is, despite the chaotic storm of immanence there must remain some capacity to distinguish the gradients of becoming without reliance upon, or at least total dependence upon, the powers of intellection to parse the universe into recognizable bits, properly digestible factoids. That is, if we undo Deleuze's aforementioned valorization of sense which, for his variation of materialism, performed the work of the transcendental, but refuse to reinstate Kant's transcendental disjunction between thing and appearance, then it must be a quality of becoming-as-being itself which can account for the discernible nature of things by sense. In an interview with Peter Gratton, Jane Bennett formulates the problem thusly: What is this strange systematicity proper to a world of Becoming? What, for example, initiates this congealing that will undo itself? Is it possible to identify phases within this formativity, plateaus of differentiation? If so, do the phases/plateaus follow a temporal sequence? Or, does the process of formation inside Becoming require us to theorize a non-chronological kind of time? I think that your student’s question: “How can we account for something like iterable structures in an assemblage theory?” is exactly the right question. Philosophy has erred too far on the side of the subject in the subject-object relation and has furthermore, lost the very weirdness of the non-human. Beyond this, the madness of thought need not override. /4/ - Ventriloquial Idealism or the Externality of Thought My aim is the opposite of Lovecraft's. He had an appreciation for natural scenery on earth and wanted to reach beyond the visible in the universe. I have no appreciation for natural scenery and want the objective universe to be a reflection of a character. Thomas Ligotti. “Devotees of Decay and Desolation.” Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure [….] Horror is more real than we are. Thomas Ligotti. “Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror”. Thomas Ligotti's tales are rife with mannequins, puppets, and other brainless entities which of replace the valorized subject of philosophy – that of the free thinking human being. His tales such as “The Dream of the Manikin” aim to destroy the rootedness of consciousness. James Trafford has connected the anti-egoism of Ligotti to Thomas Metzinger – where the self is at best an illusion and we plead desperately for someone else to acknowledge that we are real. Trafford has stated it thus, “Life is played out as an inescapable puppet show, an endless dream in which the puppets are generally unaware that they are trapped within a mesmeric dance of whose mechanisms they know nothing and over which they have no control”. An absolute materialism, for Ligotti, implies an alienation of the idea which leads to a ventriloquil idealism. As Ligotti notes in an interview, “the fiasco and nightmare of existence, the particular fiasco and nightmare of human existence, the sense that people are puppets of powers they cannot comprehend, etc.” And then further elaborates that,“[a]ssuming that anything has to exist, my perfect world would be one in which everyone has experienced the annulment of his or her ego. That is, our consciousness of ourselves as unique individuals would entirely disappear”. The externality of the idea leads to the unfortunate consequence of consciousness eating at itself through horror which, for Ligotti, is more real than reality and goes beyond horror-as-affect. Beyond this, taking together with the unreality of life and the ventriloquizing of subjectivity, Ligotti's thought becomes an idealism in which thought itself is alien and ultimately horrifying. The role of human thought and the relation of non-relation of horror to thought is not completely clear in Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Ligotti argues in his The Conspiracy Against the Human Race,that the advent of thought is a mistake of nature and that horror is being in the sense that horror results from knowing too much. Yet, at the same time, Ligotti seems to suggest that thought separates us from nature whereas, for Lovecraft, thought is far less privileged – mind is just another manifestation of the vital principal, it is just another materialization of energy. In his brilliant “Prospects for Post-Copernican Dogmatism” Iain Grant rallies against the negative definition of dogmatism and the transcendental, and suggests that negatively defining both over-focuses on conditions of access and subjectivism at the expense of the real or nature. With Schelling, who is Grant's champion against the subjectivist bastions of both Fichte and Kant, Ligotti's idealism could be taken as a transcendental realism following from an ontological realism. Yet the transcendental status of Ligotti's thought move towards a treatment of the transcendental which may threaten to leave beyond its realist ground. Ligotti states: Belief in the supernatural is only superstition. That said, a sense of the supernatural, as Conrad evidenced in Heart of Darkness, must be admitted if one's inclination is to go to the limits of horror. It is the sense of what should not be- the sense of being ravaged by the impossible. Phenomenally speaking, the super-natural may be regarded as the metaphysical counterpart of insanity, a transcendental correlative of a mind that has been driven mad. Again, Ligotti equates madness with thought, qualifying both as supernatural while remaining less emphatic about the metaphysical dimensions of horror. The question becomes one of how exactly the hallucinatory realm of the ideal relates to the black churning matter of Lovecraft's chaos of elementary particles. In his tale “I Have a Special Plan for This World” Ligotti formulates thus: A: There is no grand scheme of things. B: If there were a grand scheme of things, the fact – the fact – that we are not equipped to perceive it, either by natural or supernatural means, is a nightmarish obscenity. C: The very notion of a grand scheme of things is a nightmarish obscenity. Here Ligotti is not discounting metaphysics but implying that if it does exist the fact that we are phenomenologically ill-equipped to perceive that it is nightmarish. For Ligotti, nightmare and horror occur within the circuit of consciousness whereas for Lovecraft the relation between reality and mind is less productive on the side of mind. It is easier to ascertain how the Kantian philosophy is a defense against the diseases of the head as Kant armors his critical enterprise from too much of the world and too much of the mind. The weird fiction of both Lovecraft and Ligotti demonstrates that there is too much of both feeding into one another in a way that corrodes the Kantian schema throughly, breaking it down into a dead but still ontologically potentiated nigredo. The haunting, terrifying fact of Ligotti's idealism is that the transcendental motion which brought thought to matter, while throughly material and naturalized, brings with it the horror that thought cannot be undone without ending the material that bears it either locally or completely. Thought comes from an elsewhere and an elsewhen being-in-thought. The unthinkable outside thought is as maddening as the unthought engine of thought itself within thought which doesn't exist except for the mind, the rotting décor of the brain. /5/ - Hyperstitional Transcendental Paranoia or Self -Expelled Thought Weird fiction has been given some direct treatment in philosophy in the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land. Nick Land along with others in the 1990s created the Cyber Culture Research Unit as well as the research group Hyperstition. The now defunct hyperstitional website, an outgrowth of the Cyber Culture Research Unit, defined hyperstition in the following fourfold: 1-Element of effective culture that makes itself real. 2-Fictional quantity functional as a time-traveling device. 3-Coincidence intensifier. 4-Call to the Old Ones. The distinctively Lovecraftian character of hyperstition is hard to miss as is its Deleuzo-Guattarian roots. In the opening pages of A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari write, “We have been criticized for over-quoting literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into”. The indisinction of literature and philosophy mirrors the mess of being and knowing as post-correlationist philosophy, where philosophy tries to make itself real where literature, especially the weird, aims itself at the brain-circuit of horror. The texts of both Lovecraft and Ligotti work through horror as epistemological plasticity meeting with proximity as well as the deep time of Lovecraft and the glacially slow time of paranoia in Ligotti. Against Deleuze, and following Brassier, we cannot allow the time of consciousness, the Bergsonian time of the duree, to override natural time, but instead acknowledge that it is an unfortunate fact of existence as a thinking being. Horror-time, the time of consciousness, with all its punctuated moments and drawn out terrors, cannot compare to the deep time of non-existence both in the unreachable past and the unknown future. The crystalline cogs of Kant's account of experience as the leading light for the possibility of metaphysics must be throughly obliterated. His gloss of experience in Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics could not be more sterile: Experience consists of intuitions, which belong to the sensibility, and of judgments, which are entirely a work of the understanding. But the judgments which the understanding makes entirely out of sensuous intuitions are far from being judgments of experience. For in the one case the judgment connects only the perceptions as they are given in sensuous intuition [....] Experience consists in the synthetic connection of appearances in consciousness, so far as this connection is necessary. Here it is difficult to dismiss the queasiness that Kant's legalism induces upon sight for both Badiou and David-Menard. Kant's thought becomes, as Foucault says when reflecting on Sade's text in relation to nature, “the savage abolition of itself”. For Badiou, Kant's philosophy simply closes off too much of the outside, freezing the world of thought in an all too limited formalism. Critical philosophy is simply the systematized quarantine on future thinking, on thinking which would threaten the formalism which artificially grants thought its own coherency in the face of madness. Even the becoming-mad of Deleuze, while escaping the rumbling ground, makes grounds for itself, mad grounds but grounds which are thinkable in their affect. The field of effects allows for Deleuze's aesthetic and radical empiricism, in which effects and/or occasions make up the material of the world to be thought as a chaosmosis of simulacra. Given a critique of an empiricism of aesthetics, of the image, it may be difficult to justify an attack on Kantian formalism with the madness of literature, which does not aim to make itself real but which we may attempt to make real. That is, how do Lovecraft's and Ligotti's materials, as materials for philosophy to work on, differ from either the operative formalisms of Kant or the implicitly formalized images of Deleuzian empiricism? It is simply that such texts do not aim to make themselves real, and make claims to the real which are more alien to us than familiar, which is why their horror is immediately more trustworthy. This is the madness which Blanchot discusses in The Infinite Conversation through Cervantes and his knight – the madness of book-life, of the perverse unity of literature and life a discussion which culminates in the discussion of one of the weird's masters, that of Kafka. The text is the knowing of madness, since madness, in its moment of becoming-more-mad, cannot be frozen in place but by the solidifications of externalizing production. This is why Foucault ends his famous study with works of art. Furthermore extilligence, the ability to export the products of our maligned brains, is the companion of the attempts to export, or discover the possibility of intelligences outside of our heads, in order for philosophy to survive the solar catastrophe. To borrow again from Deleuze, writing is inseparable from becoming. The mistake is to believe that madness is reabsorbed by extilligence, by great works, or that it could be exorcised by the expelling of thought into the inorganic or differently organic. Going out of our heads does not guarantee we will no longer mean we cannot still go out of our minds. This is simply because of the outside, of matter, or force, or energy, or thing-in-itself, or Schopenhauerian Will. In Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zahn” an “impoverished student of metaphysics” becomes intrigued by strange viol music coming from above his room. After meeting the musician the student discovers that each night he plays frantic music at a window in order to keep some horridness at bay, some “impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium”. The aesthetic defenses provided by the well trained brain can bear the hex of matter for so long, the specter of unalterability within it which too many minds obliterate, collapsing everything before the thought of thought as thinkable or at least noetically mutable on our own terms. Transcendental paranoia is the concurrent nightmare and promise of Paul Humphrey's work, of being literally out of our minds. It is the gothic counterpart of thinking non-conceptually but also of thinking never belonging to any instance of purportedly solid being. As Bataille stated, “At the boundary of that which escapes cohesion, he who reflects within cohesion realizes there is no longer any room for him” Thought is immaterial only to the degree that it is inhuman, it is a power that tries, always with failure, to ascertain its own genesis. Philosophy, if it can truly return to the great outdoors, if it can leave behind the dead loop of the human skull, must recognize not only the non-priority of human thought, but that thought never belongs to the brain that thinks it, thought comes from somewhere else. To return to the train image from the beginning “a locomotive rolling on the surface of the earth is the image of continuous metamorphosis” this is the problem of thought, and of thinking thought, of being no longer able to isolate thought, with only a thought-formed structure. [1] One of the central tenets of Francois Laruelle's non-philosophy is that philosophy has traditionally operated on material already presupposed as thinkable instead of trying to think the real in itself. Philosophy, according to Laruelle, remains fixated on transcendental synthesis which shatters immanence into an empirical datum and an a prori factum which are then fused by a third thing such as the ego. For a critical account of Laruelle's non-philosophy see Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound. (shrink)

The turn to analytic philosophy in Anglophone countries, which is still underway and is spreading elsewhere, has generally involved a retreat from ‘synoptic’ thinking and an almost complete withdrawal from ‘synthetic’ thinking, the creative thinking that in the past has been the source of the greatest contributions of philosophy to science, the humanities and civilization. Analytic philosophy’s ‘naturalistic turn’ led by Willard van Ormond Quine was really a capitulation of philosophy to mainstream reductionist science. So-called ‘continental (...) philosophy’ when it abjures naturalism, offers no real challenge to this. This paper attempts to recover a much more powerful challenge to such analytic philosophy and reductionist science, a philosophy which is naturalist but values synopsis and synthesis along with analysis: speculative naturalism. As such, this is presented as a manifesto not only for philosophy, but for science and the humanities. As Mikhail Epstein argued, the practical outcome of the humanities is the transformation of culture. To transform culture is to transform ourselves, our society and our relationship to each other and to nature. (shrink)

This paper, which is a homage to the life and work of Stephen Gaukroger, explores competing receptions of Spencer’s programmatic synthetic philosophy. In so doing, I show how T.H Huxley and C.S. Peirce reconfigured a familiar, long-standing debate about cosmogeny and cosmology in the early modern period.

Katzav and Vaesen have argued that control by analytic philosophers of key journals, philosophy departments and at least one funding body plays a substantial role in explaining the emergence of analytic philosophy into dominance in the Anglophone world and the corresponding decline of speculative philosophy. They also argued that this use of control suggests a characterisation of analytic philosophy as, at the institutional level, a sectarian form of critical philosophy. I test these hypotheses against (...) data about philosophy job hires at key philosophy departments in the USA during the period 1930-1979, and against data about PhD completions during the period 1956-1965. I argue, further, that Katzav and Vaesen’s hypotheses can fully explain the data and are more fully able to do so than are some other key accounts of the emergence of analytic philosophy in the USA. (shrink)

C.D. Broad pointed out that philosophy in the Twentieth Century radically reduced its scope by contracting the methods it deployed. While traditionally philosophers had used analysis, synopsis and synthesis to reveal and overcome the inconsistencies of culture, critical philosophers reduced the role accorded to synopsis and eliminated any role for synthesis. This, it is argued, was a disastrous wrong turn that has led philosophers to embrace scientism, equated with naturalism, which has marginalized and reduced to irrelevance not only most (...) of philosophy, but most of the humanities. Showing how such philosophy evolved from one branch of neo-Kantian philosophy, it is argued there was no reason to constrict philosophy in this way. An alternative, more fruitful but largely misrepresented and submerged tradition of philosophical naturalism deriving from Kant is identified, a tradition which can best be characterized as “speculative naturalism”. This tradition, unlike the tradition of analytic philosophy, has made major contributions to science, and is allying science and the humanities. As Michail Epstein pointed out, while the practical outcome of natural science is technology, the practical outcome of the humanities is the transformation of culture, and ourselves. It is central to the creation of the future. Philosophy associated with speculative naturalism promises to play a major role in the transformation of culture required to overcome the current global ecological crisis. It could provide the foundation for a new “ecological civilization”. (shrink)

Recent developments in Continental philosophy have included the emergence of a school of “speculative realism,” which rejects the human-centered orientation that has long dominated Continental thought. Proponents of speculative realism differ on several issues, but many agree on the need for an object-oriented ontology. Some speculative realists identify realism with materialism, while others accord equal reality to objects that are non-material, even fictional. Several thinkers retain a focus on difference, a well-established theme in Continental thought. This (...) paper looks at speculative realism from the perspective of systems theory. Many of the tenets of speculative realism have long been features of systems metaphysics and are expressed clearly in a systems framework. However, some views of some speculative realists differ substantially from systems theoretic ideas. (shrink)

In this essay it is shown that the imaginative art of scientific theorizing – at its technical best – animates Quine's philosophy as importantly as the more Spartan norms honored in his present pantheon of virtues. By drawing a contrast between the standing of theories in philosophy and theories in science, it will be shown that the speculative reaches of philosophy, along with developments in semantic theory, now oblige an internal revision of Quine's stance against meaning (...) as it was announced in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” So, corollary to this proposed revision, I argue that in natural philosophy, the muse of the “art of science” deserves an address along with the more Spartan norms in Quine's present philosophical pantheon. As semantic theory and analyticity thus gain a measure of philosophical tenability, Quine's holism emerges as the more central doctrine of his mature vision. (shrink)

The chapter studies the speculative realist critique of the notion of finitude and its implications for the theme of the "end of the world" as a teleological and eschatological idea. It is first explained how Quentin Meillassoux proposes to overcome both Kantian and Heideggerian "correlationist" approaches with his speculative thesis of absolute contingency. It is then shown that Meillassoux's speculative materialism also dismantles the close link forged by Kant between the teleological ends of human existence and a (...) teleological notion of the "end of the world." Speculative materialism no longer sees the end of thought, or the end of the thinking human being, as an insurmountable limit of conceivability, but rather as one contingent and possible event among others. This allows us to conceive an "end of all things" in a positive sense with regard to which the old eschatological hope for the end of the present world of injustice and for the emergence of a new world of perfect, "divine" justice becomes meaningful and legitimate in an entirely new sense. (shrink)

Speculative fiction, such as science fiction and fantasy, has a unique epistemic value. We examine similarities and differences between speculative fiction and philosophical thought experiments in terms of how they are cognitively processed. They are similar in their reliance on mental prospection, but dissimilar in that fiction is better able to draw in readers (transportation) and elicit emotional responses. By its use of longer, emotionally poignant narratives and seemingly irrelevant details, speculative fiction allows for a better appraisal (...) of the consequences of philosophical ideas than thought experiments. (shrink)

This relationship between human and Cosmos, is what Meillassoux refers as “correlationism”. Humans can only establish a correlation with the world through representational structures, but never can they access the in itself. But if one can only experience the world from their own perspective and understand it through synthetic categories via languages, then what is reality “as such”? This is part of what a speculative realist attempts to answer. It is also here, as what pertains to this “real”, where (...) Meillassoux intervenes the discourses of Descartes, Hume, Kant, and 20th century philosophers like Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and Emmanuel Levinas. (shrink)

With rising portmanteaux such as Ecosophy and ecolinguistics, a significant trend that aims to blend ecology with multiple disciplines continues to be on the ascent since the last century. The recent challenge to the anthropocentric worldview is a crucial motivation for such blends. With the upheaval of "genetic information," the information system that formerly bolstered and maintained anthropocentrism is now challenging its tenets. The term eco refers to the critical relationships between humans and nonhumans, between microscopic and macroscopic worlds. Ecolinguistics (...) studies the relation between eco and how we communicate about ecological entities and processes. Many studies have revealed how language and communication influence the environment and its nonhuman inhabitants. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA henceforth), for instance, has exposed the role of language in reducing and promoting racism, social inequalities, and sexism. In a larger framework, Ecosophy provides intellectual and empirical insights that can give succinct access to unmuted communications in a more-than-human world by participating in more-than-mammal philosophies of survival, living, and dying. The paper will explore Dona Haraway's notion of SF (an abbreviation for speculative fabulations, string figures, speculative philosophy, and situated feminism) and Gregory Bateson's relational thesis of "double descriptions" to unite 'eco' and 'language' with each other. This will be done by suggesting alternative ways of approaching CDA and possible linguistic renovations (for instance, Prof. S. Veeramani’s notion of relexifying terms to promote environmental sensitivity and awareness). (shrink)

Educated people everywhere now acknowledge that ecological destruction is threatening the future of civilization. While philosophers have concerned themselves with environmental problems, they appear to offer little to deal with this crisis. Despite this, I will argue that philosophy, and ethics, are absolutely crucial to overcoming this crisis. Philosophy has to recover its grand ambitions to achieve a comprehensive understanding of nature and the place of humanity within it, and ethics needs to be centrally concerned with the virtues (...) required to create and then sustain economic, social and political formations that augment the life of ecological communities. Achieving these ends will involve reviving speculative philosophy and its quest to forge a synthesis of natural philosophy, history and art to enable humanity to redefine its place in the world, both collectively and as individuals, in very practical ways. Such a synthesis is required to oppose the corrosion of democracy and to revive the virtues of citizenship and the sense of responsibility citizenship entails, but more fundamentally and intimately related to such citizenship, to oppose managerialism and the proletarianization of the workforce and to revive workmanship and professionalism as the foundations of not only economic life, but social and political life. (shrink)

Philosophy of immunology is a subfield of philosophy of biology dealing with ontological and epistemological issues related to the studies of the immune system. While speculative investigations and abstract analyses have always been part of immune theorizing, until recently philosophers have largely ignored immunology. Yet the implications for understanding the philosophical basis of organismal functions framed by immunity offer new perspectives on fundamental questions of biology and medicine. Developed in the context of history of medicine, theoretical biology, (...) and medical anthropology, philosophy of immunology differs from these related branches of study in its focus on traditional philosophical questions concerning identity, individuality, ecology, cognition, scientific methodology and theory construction. This broad agenda derives from immunology’s multifaceted research program that has developed from its initial clinical challenges of host defense, transplantation, autoimmunity, tumor immunology, and allergy. In addition to these well-established research areas, immunity is now understood to play a central role in other physiological functions, development, ecology, and evolutionary mechanics. Holding together these diverse domains of inquiry lie philosophical commitments oriented by organismal identity. In this regard, pertinent issues are raised concerning cognition (organization of immune perception and information processing), the character of individuality (framed by the ecological context of immune-mediated assimilation and rejection), and the dynamics of complex systems (understood as holistic systems biology). Indeed, immunology, in the context of cognitive science, evolutionary biology, environmental sciences, and development provides multi-focal perspectives for philosophy of science. (shrink)

Recension of the 2023 book "Ethics and Time in the Philosophy of History" an interesting book on metaphysics, moral philosophy, existentialism, and speculative philosophy of history.

In her short story “Stable Strategies for Middle Management,” Eileen Gunn imagines a future in which Margaret, an office worker, seeks radical genetic enhancements intended to help her secure the middle-management job she wants. One source of the story’s tension and dark humor is dramatic irony: readers can see that the enhancements Margaret buys stand little chance of making her life go better for her; enhancing is, for Margaret, probably a prudential mistake. This paper argues that our positions in the (...) real world are sufficiently similar to Margaret’s position in Gunn’s fictional world that we should take this story seriously as grounding an argument from analogy for the conclusion that radical genetic enhancements are, for us, probably a prudential mistake. The paper then defends this method. When the question at hand is one of speculative ethics, there is no method better fit to the purpose than argument from analogy to speculative fiction. (shrink)

Grace A. de Laguna was an American philosopher of exceptional originality. Many of the arguments and positions she developed during the early decades of the twentieth century later came to be central to analytic philosophy. These arguments and positions included, even before 1930, a critique of the analytic-synthetic distinction, a private language argument, a critique of type physicalism, a functionalist theory of mind, a critique of scientific reductionism, a methodology of research programs in science and more. Nevertheless, de Laguna (...) identified herself as a defender of the speculative vision of philosophy, a vision which, in her words, “analytic philosophy condemns.” I outline her speculative vision of philosophy as well as what is, in effect, an argument she offers against analytic philosophy. This is an argument against the view that key parts of established opinion, e.g., our best theoretical physics or most certain common sense, should be assumed to be true in order to answer philosophical questions. I go on to bring out the implications of her argument for the approaches to philosophy of Bertrand Russell, Willard V. Quine and David Lewis, and I also compare the argument to recent, related arguments against analytic philosophy. I will suggest that de Laguna offers a viable critique of analytic philosophy and an alternative approach to philosophy that meets this critique. (shrink)

The writings and speeches of the Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (2018-2024) have been characterized by a constant reference to a teleological history. Using Karl Löwith’s proposals, I analyse the president’s liberal-progressive idea of history and I propose that in this respect he has followed a certain speculative philosophy of history, which I call philosophy of Trans-Historic-History.

In this article, we evaluate Meillassoux’s criticism of correlationism in general and of Heidegger’s correlationism in particular. Contrary to earlier contributions, we argue that Meillassoux’s reflections on uncorrelated being not only serve an epistemological but also an ontological interest; both Meillassoux and Heidegger are interested in the way we have access to uncorrelated being as well as in the nature of uncorrelated being itself. After introducing Meillassoux’s criticism of the correlationism of Heidegger, we reflect on three arguments of his account (...) of planet earth as un-correlated being; the emergence of planet earth, the presupposed accessibility of un-correlated being and his criticism of Heidegger’s fideism. Although it becomes clear that Meillassoux’s criticism of correlationism is not applicable in the case of Heidegger, it also helps us to articulate the relevance of Heidegger’s “realist” approach of uncorrelated being in contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

This essay critiques the return to objects posited by certain new materialisms, most specifically the speculative realism of Harman, Meillassoux and Brassier. It argues that their “non-relational” and “autonomous” ontology represents a neo-positivist conception of reality. In place of such an atomistic ontology, I will suggest that the new materialisms develop a more productive, “non-reductive materialism”—a term drawn from analytic philosophy of mind. I will interpret Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Luc Nancy as crucial examples of such a materialism on the (...) continental side. Rather than being based on the non-relational innerness of an object, this position instead takes into account matter’s fundamentally extended nature. Confirmed by examples such as the growing evidence for neuroplasticity, the externalist, non-reductive view advances the new materialist argument that matter is “agentive” and “active” rather than “mechanic” and “passive,” without slipping into an anti-social-constructionist biologism or behaviorism. (shrink)

This introductory article outlines how this special issue contributes to existing scholarship that calls for a rethinking and re-evaluation of common assumptions about early modern philosophy. One way of challenging existing narratives is by questioning what role systems or systematicity play during this period. Another way of rethinking early modern philosophy is by considering assumptions about the role of philosophy itself and how philosophy can effect change in those who form philosophical beliefs or engage in philosophical (...) argumentation. A further way of advancing early modern scholarship is by examining the tight links between early modern views on metaphysics and epistemology, on the one hand, and moral, social, and political philosophy, on the other hand. Moreover, there are ongoing debates whether and how the traditional distinction between rationalism and empiricism, which has been questioned for several reasons, should be replaced. It has been proposed to replace it with a distinction between experimental and speculative philosophy, but this distinction cannot easily accommodate early modern debates concerning moral, social, and political philosophy. In addition to highlighting several ways how early modern philosophy has and can be rethought, we summarize how the papers in this special issue contribute to these ongoing efforts. (shrink)

Focusing principally on the once-feted philosophical movement of object-oriented ontology (OOO), this article examines the ways in which this movement fits into a broader “speculative turn,” which seeks to reverse the purportedly wrongheaded emphasis of post-Kantian critical philosophy upon the finitude of the subject and to once again unleash the fecund potentialities of speculative thought. Identifying several incongruities and tensions that traverse this project, it is argued that OOO exemplifies the difficulties faced when attempting to articulate a (...) decidedly pre-critical metaphysics. (shrink)

This paper reconstructs the natural philosophical method of Geminiano Montanari, one of the most prominent Italian natural philosophers of the late seventeenth century. Montanari’s views are used as a case study to assess recent claims concerning early modern experimental philosophy. Having presented the distinctive tenets of seventeenth-century experimental philosophers, I argue that Montanari adheres to them explicitly, thoroughly, and consistently. The study of Montanari’s views supports three claims. First, experimental philosophy was not an exclusively British phenomenon. Second, in (...) spite of some portrayals of experimental philosophy as an ‘atheoretical’ or ‘purely descriptive’ enterprise, experimental philosophers could consistently endorse a variety of natural philosophical explanations and postulate theoretical entities. Third, experimental philosophy and mechanical philosophy were not, as such, antagonistic. They could be consistently combined in a single philosophical enterprise. (shrink)

Graham Harman judges science and common sense in terms of the crude philosophical criteria of another age and finds them lacking in knowledge of reality. He posits a shadowy "withdrawn" realm of real objects in order to explain the discrepancies between his naive abstract model of knowledge as access and the concrete reality of the sciences. Works such as THE QUADRUPLE OBJECT, THE THIRD TABLE and BELLS AND WHISTLES, like the whole of his philosophy, are the record of Harman (...) noticing the discrepancies, but refusing to revise the model. His solution is a dead-end, the timid, nostalgic, and fundamentally misleading propounding of an antiquated epistemology under the cover of a "new" ontology. (shrink)

This paper argues that early modern experimental philosophy emerged as the dominant member of a pair of methods in natural philosophy, the speculative versus the experimental, and that this pairing derives from an overarching distinction between speculative and operative philosophy that can be ultimately traced back to Aristotle. The paper examines the traditional classification of natural philosophy as a speculative discipline from the Stagirite to the seventeenth century; medieval and early modern attempts to (...) articulate a scientia experimentalis; and the tensions in the classification of natural magic and mechanics that led to the introduction of an operative part of natural philosophy in the writings of Francis Bacon and John Johnston. The paper concludes with a summary of the salient discontinuities between the experimental/speculative distinction of the mid-seventeenth century and its predecessors and a statement of the developments that led to the ascendance of experimental philosophy from the 1660s. (shrink)

Philosophy of science appears caught in what Einstein (1933) called the ‘eternal antithesis between the two inseparable components of our knowledge – the empirical and the rational’ (p. 271). It wants to employ metaphysical speculation, but impressed with the methods of the subject it studies, it fears overreaching. Philosophy of science thus tries to walk a fine line between scientifically grounded metaphysics and its more speculative cousins. Here I try to draft some of the contour of this (...) boundary. (shrink)

The foundational gesture of New Materialism and Speculative Realism dismisses vast swaths of past philosophy and theory in order to signify their own avant-garde status. The violence of this gesture, which tries to corral difference within past texts in order to feign its own purity, can be considered as a theoretical quarantine. Examples of medical and spiritual quarantine, the 2014 ebola epidemic and Jesus’ temptation, are analyzed to show that the figure is inherently compromised – the harder one (...) fights to keep the other away, the more one becomes inseparable from it. Derrida's reflections on the reactions against deconstruction show that this desire for progress is always inherently conservative; Meillassoux and Jane Bennett are considered as contemporary examples. A deconstruction of corralation and the academico-capitalist forces driving these ‘innovations’ might open us to reading the never-simply-past text, and to the possibility of the event. (shrink)

I revisit my paper, ‘Grace de Laguna’s 1909 Critique of Analytic Philosophy’ and respond to the commentary on it. I respond to James Chase and Jack Reynolds by further analysing the difference between speculative philosophy as de Laguna conceived of it and analytic philosophy, by clarifying how her critique of analytic philosophy remains relevant to some of its more speculative forms, and by explaining what justifies the criticism of established opinion that goes along with (...) her rejection of analytic philosophy’s epistemic conservatism. In response to Andreas Vrahimis, I contextualise my reading of de Laguna’s work in 1909. This clarifies her critique of pragmatism, distinguishes it from her critique of epistemically conservative philosophy, and shows that she was not only already aware of the full scope of the latter critique but is likely to have identified the then incipient analytic philosophy as its primary target. Also, contra Vrahimis, her argument is effective against Bertrand Russell’s later, epistemically conservative approach to philosophy. In response to Cheryl Misak, I point out that her argument that de Laguna is, despite herself, a pragmatist rests on a misunderstanding of the differences between pragmatism and idealism, and I show that de Laguna’s main early influences were Herbert Spencer and her teacher, James Edwin Creighton. I further argue that Misak’s rejection of de Laguna’s critique of pragmatism rests on a misrepresentation of the critique. (shrink)

The paper aims to support the thesis that Schelling’s late philosophy (1827-1854) progressively transformed from a religious philosophy to a philosophy of religion. Accordingly, (Christian) religion, initially taken as an auxiliary and guiding source of philosophical reflection, gradually becomes a specific object of philosophical speculation. The paper analyzes this change by identifying three phases of Schelling’s Spätphilosophie. Finally, it offers an account of the epistemological framework within which Schelling’s philosophy of religion fits and highlights its originality (...) from those of his contemporaries. (shrink)

Warranting further examination is how the nascent philosophical tradition initially spread to this region from its Ionian provenance. Despite numerous ancient attestations that Parmenides of Elea was influenced, or even directly instructed, by the Ionian-born Xenophanes, many modern scholars remain skeptical of this historical association. The extent of this skepticism ranges from cautious uncertainty to outright denial of any historical plausibility. The skeptical grounds similarly vary, from distrusting the historical veracity of late and/or perhaps biased commentators, to understanding these thinkers (...) as involved in radically different projects. This essay aims to challenge the skeptical position, and establish a direct link disseminating Ionian philosophy to Magna Graecia via Xenophanes and Parmenides. The argument is straightforward. First, the ancient geographical and temporal evidence is noted, establishing that it was possible for Parmenides to have been influenced and/or taught by Xenophanes. Next, the metaphysical and epistemological parallels between these thinkers are considered. Despite notable differences, on balance, these close parallels suggest against the skeptical view, making it quite plausible to impute a direct intellectual link between these thinkers. Third, I consider ancient claims that both thinkers were engaging with religious topics, offering a sort of “rational theology.” This evidence for a close intellectual relationship between these thinkers has been entirely ignored by modern scholars, and orthodox interpretative models cannot readily provide a charitable explanation for them. However, by reconsidering the theistic content in Parmenides’s poem, a new interpretative approach is revealed which can. Once this evidence is considered in its totality, the case for imputing a close and direct intellectual heritage from Xenophanes to Parmenides proves quite substantial. (shrink)

Abstract: It is the aim of this paper to establish a temporal and cultural link between entheogen-use1 in Classical mystery cults and their possible use in a segment of the early Christian Gnostic Church. As early Christianity was heavily influenced by the Classical world in which it first developed, it is essential to examine the evidence of entheogen-use within Classical mystery cults, and explore their possible influence on the development of Christian ritual. We will first present textual evidence from the (...) New Testament and Nag Hammadi Library (NHL) that indicate possible use of ritual entheogens. Next we will examine entheogen-use by some of the main religious sects of the ancient Mediterranean world as part of their liturgical practice between c. fifth century BCE and the third century CE. Then we will show that the different schools of philosophical thought examined were quite fluid, and that there was considerable overlap among schools with respect to several key philosophies and practices. Ultimately the subject of entheogen-use in the Classical world necessarily falls into the realm of plausible speculation mainly due to the lack of primary sources. However, should the entheogenic hypothesis2 prove to be correct, it promises to be quite useful in future research and in the translation of original documents. (shrink)

This paper is guided by, and begins to make plausible, the idea that there can be a naturalistic metaphilosophy, i.e., an inquiry that takes philosophy as an object of study in something like the way that contemporary (naturalistic) philosophy of science takes science as an object of study. The paper’s more specific goal is to ventilate certain provocative speculations concerning the character of philosophy’s cognitive achievement, especially over time. But this more specific goal will be approached indirectly, (...) through addressing in a preliminary way the question what the proper relationship is between philosophy and the study of philosophy’s history. (shrink)

The professionalization of the study of history in the Nineteenth Century made possible a new way of thinking about the history of philosophy: the thought emerged that philosophy itself might be relative to time, historical culture, and nationality. The simultaneous demise of speculative metaphysics scattered philosophers’ confidence that the historical variance of philosophical systems could be viewed in terms of the teleological self-realization of reason. Towards the late Nineteenth Century, philosophers began to explicitly address the worry that (...) all philosophical systems might have only relative validity. This paper compares two key figures in late-nineteenth-century debates concerning historical relativism: Wilhelm Windelband and Wilhelm Dilthey. Beneath the deep disagreements between these two authors, it reveals their common concern to immunize philosophy from the threat of historical relativism. The paper traces how both philosophers sought to fend off relativism by defending the idea of an ahistorical and permanent stratum of philosophical thinking. And it argues that although they succeeded in blocking historical versions of relativism, they did so at the cost of incurring a relativism vis-à-vis philosophical systems. This relativism turned out to be rooted not in the historicity of philosophy but in the timeless essence of philosophical reasoning itself. (shrink)

Recently, mainstream philosophy journals have tended to implement more and more stringent forms of peer review, probably in an attempt to prevent editorial decisions that are based on factors other than quality. Against this trend, we propose that journals should relax their standards of acceptance, as well as be less restrictive about whom is to decide what is admitted into the debate. We start by arguing, partly on the basis of the history of peer review in the journal Mind, (...) that past and current peer review practices attest to partisanship with respect to philosophical approach. Then, we explain that such partisanship conflicts with the standard aims of peer review, and that it is both epistemically and morally problematic. This assessment suggests that, if feasible, journals should treat all available and proposed standards of acceptance in philosophy as epistemically equal, and that philosophical work should be evaluated in terms of the novelty and significance of its contribution to developing thought in ways that are of value. Finally, we show, in a programmatic way, that improving the current situation is feasible, and can be done fairly easily. (shrink)

The present text is the revised and corrected English translation of the book published in German by the Lang Verlag, Bern 2008. Unfortunately the text still has some minor flaws (especially in the Index Locorum) but they do not concern the main thesis or the arguments. It will still be the final version, especially considering my age. It is among the most widespread and the least questioned convictions that in Metaphysics Lambda Aristotle presents a theology which has its basis in (...) a metaphysics of substance. Doubts about theological interpretation are beginning to stir in a growing number of publications, but nevertheless the majority of research literature, compendiums and histories of philosophy argues within this frame. A closer look at the facts reveals that this conviction has no basis in the text. Quite the contrary it is based on a reception with theological interests. It arised over centuries, starting from Patristic times and the Middle Ages; it was influenced by Neoplatonic texts as the Liber de Causis or the Theologia Aristotelis, texts for a long time considered as original Aristotelian books. And, if you read not translations but the Greek text, you see that the word 'god' occurs much less than in a theological book should be. In some translations we find more occurences of that word, and especially in French, Italian, English translations some words as le Bien, l'Intelligence etc. are written with capitals to inticate that it is about god. To make it even more clear, we read often the term 'First Mover' or 'Unmoved Mover' as an other name for god, but this expression is never used by Aristotle. So the reader has the impression that Aristotle speaks continuously about god. In addition, in the present book you will find arguments which clean up with the outdated concept of substance in the Aristotelian text, a concept which was developed for quite other problems than Aristotle had, namely theolgical ones. And, if there is no substance, there is no corresponding metaphysics of substance and no theology or onto-theology. If substance, metyphysics, theology play no role in Metaphysics Lambda, what else is its content and aim? That is not so difficult to say because Aristotle says it sufficiently clear in his first sentence, περὶ οὐσίας ἡ θεωρία: our inquiry is about being; its aim is to develop the Frage nach dem Sein and to state a speculative answer: being is noesis, Sein ist Gewahren. (shrink)

In this paper, I attempt to look at the differential (as in interventionist) readings undertaken by speculative realists (A school of contemporary thought reacting against post-Kantian 'Correlationism') Iain Hamilton Grant and Ray Brassier, with the former concentrating on reading Schelling's naturalism relating to reason, while the latter claiming the constancy of thought's connection to thought. For Brassier, thought must be transcendentally separate from nature, or what he calls 'exteriority', and Grant insists on nature's thinking as plain nature. This doesn't (...) mean 'interiority' is given weight in Grant's thought, but, on the contrary isn't a concern, as for him, the limiting factor of thinking (dichotomy in subject-object relationality) is the regionality of a particular identity attempting to grasp nature's infintude. Brassier maintains scientific statements as capable of supplying reasons for believing in the possibilities of determining thought's tracking and missing nature. He accomplishes this by clarifying notions of concept and distinguishing objects from concepts. This alien-ness of thought generates the possibilities of questioning the human production as against nature. This cardinal issue tries to answer the repercussions probably generated in the wake of either apathetic aspects of mind or the deepest powers of speculation. Not only that, a simultaneous questioning of the legitimacy of ontology and epistemology in the natural world is encountered. Grant advocates the objectifying of the self to grasp the productivity of self's thinking, but at the same time considering objectifying as an ongoing process, a kind of 'becoming'. In other words, it is the questioning of the limits of 'being' in the creation of episteme that takes precedence in Grant. Brassier on the other hand is concerned with the doing away of the dichotomy of being and thinking of meaning. This tension raises the issue of nature philosophy in a duel of 'eliminativism' and 'materialism', between the extent that calls for grounding nature without reliance on a structure undermining the discovery of contemporary science or supporting an anthropic view. (shrink)

Adversarial philosophy is under attack (!), but I speculate that it is useful for working out the level of a philosopher and sometimes for increasing the respect awarded to some individuals and groups. There may be no alternative to it when you have an excess of philosophers of around the same level.

We simulate trial data to test speculative claims about research methods, such as the impact of publication bias.

The fictional worlds of science fiction can stimulate philosophical speculation towards socio-technical scenarios and trends that are extrapolated from our physical reality. This widely accepted observation highlights but one of the ways to pursue philosophy with the aid of fiction and science fiction in particular. In this paper, we argue that fiction can in itself constitute a philosophical, academic work and need not merely represent the subject about which such work speculates. This idea questions the currently predominant, institutional paradigm (...) which identifies philosophical works with written texts and specifically with a single kind of text: the paper-format (§1). To suggest an alternative way of doing philosophy, we analyse the structure and content of the recent, experimental science fiction book, The Clouds, and propose that its hybrid textuality – which leverages at once fiction, theory, and meta-commentary – offers a possible corrective to the cognitive closure and rigidity of expression encouraged by the institutionally accepted approach to philosophical work (§ 2). (shrink)

Reading the Phenomenology onto-grammatically means interpreting its constitutive forms of consciousness as grammatical iterations of the speculative proposition, where the subject-object relations can be read as dialogical encounters between subject and predicate, where the predicate “talks back”, creating a discursive space of hermeneutical ambiguity and openness, at play in the copula. The article begins with a brief presentation of Hegel’s general theory of language, as it pertains to the distinction between the linguistic sign (Zeichen) and the word (Wort), drawn (...) from his later writings, before applying these grammatical terms to the ontological reading of the speculative sentence, as presented in the Preface to the Phenomenology and discussed by Jere Surber. Then, the article puts its dialogical insights into practice, examining how the onto-grammatical reading of the speculative sentence plays out in the Phenomenology’s famous "lordship and bondage" (aka "master/slave") dialectic. (shrink)

This chapter proceeds from the standard picture of the relation between intuitions and experimental philosophy: the alleged evidential role of intuitions about hypothetical cases, and experimental philosophy’s challenge to these judgments, based on their variation with philosophically irrelevant factors. I will survey some of the main defenses of this standard picture against the x-phi challenge, most of which fail. Concerning the most popular defense, the expertise defense, I will draw the bleak conclusion that intuitive expertise of the envisaged (...) kind is largely a myth. Next, I will consider the mischaracterization objection, which has mainly been developed by Deutsch and Cappelen on the basis of textual evidence: that philosophers do not appeal to intuitions as evidence for their case judgments, but instead argue for them. This would render the x-phi challenge mostly irrelevant, due to its focus on intuitions about hypothetical cases. I will then consider a few instructive replies to the mischaracterization objection, which are all unconvincing on further inspection. Finally, I will discuss some potential normative consequences of the mischaracterization objection, and I will argue that it recommends a shift away from the excessive focus on intuitions about cases in metaphilosophy and experimental philosophy, towards more work on the role of argumentation in the method of cases. More speculatively, I claim that philosophers should always argue for their case judgments, even if they have strong intuitions about them, because an argument-based methodology would be more transparent and philosophically fruitful than one that mainly relies on intuition. (shrink)