Description
Book SynopsisIn this illuminating volume, Donald Phillip Verene challenges philosophy to pass beyond the limits of criticism and reflection toward a form of speculative philosophy that express the Hegelian sense in which the True is the whole and the Socratic sense in which the aim of philosophy is self-knowledge.
Trade ReviewWith imagination and learning, Professor Verene recalls speculative (or systematic) philosophy to the center of high culture. His foil is philosophy conceived as critical reflection and analysis, which objectifies its topic but leaves out its own account. Speculative philosophy, by contrast, cultivates the imagination of rhetorical creativity and the systematic learning of how things fit into a self-explaining whole, an inevitably tragic because always imperfect project. Vico, Hegel, Cassirer, and James Joyce are Verene’s muses, although his discussion ranges through figures throughout Western philosophy from Plato and Aristotle down to Peirce and Whitehead. More than any thinker since Collingwood, Verene shows the humanistic heart of philosophy. I shall cite this book often, repeating its images and arguing them out to my own conclusions. -- Robert Cummings Neville, Boston University
Table of ContentsPart 1 Preface Part 2 Introduction Chapter 3 The Canon of the Primal Scene in Speculative Philosophy Chapter 4 Philosophical Pragmatics Chapter 5 Putting Philosophical Questions (in)to Language Chapter 6 Absolute Knowledge and Philosophical Language Chapter 7 The Limits of Knowledge: Argument and Autobiography Chapter 8 Philosophical Aesthetics Chapter 9 Philosophical Memory Chapter 10 Culture, Categories, and the Imagination Chapter 11 Metaphysical Narration, Science, and Symbolic Form Chapter 12 Myth and Metaphysics
