Reck, "Speculative Philosophy"

Speculative Philosophy is a call for philosophers to return to philosophy in the grand manner—as the discipline that seeks to provide man with a systematic, coherent, and integrated view of existence.

“Nearly all the great philosophers from Thales to Whitehead,” writes Professor Reck, “have been speculative,” and it is primarily due to the influence of modern pragmatism, positivism, and analysis that speculative philosophy and its fundamental branch—metaphysics—have fallen into disrepute. “Whereas pragmatists asserted that metaphysition was a useless escape from the problems of men, the logical positivists vigorously denied that metaphysics was cognitively meaningful. It is impossible,” argues Reck, “to underestimate the damage which the logical positivists and their followers have done to philosophy in the United States.”

This antagonism to speculative philosophy culminated in linguistic analysis, which sought not the principles of reality, but the principles, or rules, of language—in the hope that linguistic clarification would dissolve the problems faced by philosophers for over 2,000 years. Metaphysical inquiry, if permitted by the analysts at all, was trivialized into a kind of linguistic therapy.

Reck realizes that a revival of speculative philosophy is essential to the survival of philosophy itself, for what it seeks is not mere cleverness or “the Reason of Ulysses,” but theoretical knowledge, “the Reason of Plato” —in a word, wisdom. Such an approach to philosophy has five basic characteristics: it is systematic, comprehensive, metaphysical, explanatory, and conjectural (i.e., open to revision).

With this as his framework, the author proceeds to examine and explain the major systems of speculative philosophy throughout history—realism, materialism, idealism, and process philosophy—and he traces the inter-relationships of their various exponents. The expositions are superb; even the reader with no philosophical training will have little difficulty in grasping the essentials of the approaches discussed by Professor Reck. His analyses are always fair, clear, and to the point.

Perhaps because the bulk of this work is expository, I find little in it to disagree with. My main objections center around some remarks in the final chapter, “The Uses of Speculative Philosophy,” in which Reck discusses such notions as the “religious,” “aesthetic,” and “social” uses of speculative philosophy. The charge that Carnap, for example, “betrays insensitivity to the aesthetic values of philosophical systems” when he remarks that “metaphysicians are musicians without musical ability,” or Reck’s comment that speculative philosophy may in some cases be “used as a religion,” I find quite strange, to say the least.

But these are minor quibbles when Speculative Philosophy is viewed in its entirety. And what rational man cannot help but be in sympathy with Reck’s central purpose when he cites with approval the following magnificent passage from A. N. Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World:

The great conquerors, from Alexander to Caesar, and from Caesar to Napoleon, influenced profoundly the lives of subsequent generations. But the

total effect of this influence shrinks to insignificance, if compared to the entire transformation of human habits and human mentality produced by a long line of men of thought from Thales to the present day, men individually powerless, but ultimately the rulers of the world.

Reviewed by George H. Smith / Philosophy (284 pages) / LR Price $4.45