Volume IX Number 1

Ottawa, Canada

Spring 1997


Message from the President

Francis Peddle

This issue of ELEUTHERIA contains pieces by Peter McCormick and myself. McCormick’s essay “Relatively Objective?” was an invited presentation at the University of Ottawa’s Philosophy Colloquium, “Realism and Anti-Realism,” March 15, 1997. My article on Hegel and music was originally read at the Canadian Society for Aesthetics annual meeting during the Learned Societies Conference, Laval University, Quebec City, May 31, 1989.

McCormick considers primarily the views of Putnam, Rorty and Wittgenstein is his essay on relationalism and relativism. Interpreting Putnam as suggesting that “the language that enables us to say that some things are true, warranted, reasonable, that some things are objective, is relative in the sense that it rests on something else; it rests on–trust” leads us to difficult issues of alienation and acknowledgment. McCormick questions whether trust is sufficient to undergird an objectivism. This short discussion of the relative and the objective demonstrates that any consideration of the two appears to involve ineliminable side excursions into scepticism, cultural alienation and doubt about any principle that gives off the ambience of the foundational.

In Hegelian philosophy the underlying principles of rational philosophical speculation, or what twentieth century critics tend to characterize as foundational, are in continual dialectical tension with individuated thought-determinations. In my brief consideration of Hegel’s treatment of music in his Aesthetics this tension often gets onesidedly interpreted by commentators insofar as it is said that Hegel does not consider music an art form which stands forth in its own right but is submerged in the indeterminateness of the transition in his system to the poetical arts. Such an interpretation is inimical to the forceful analytical component that Hegel generally delineates in most thought-determinations (Denkbestimmungen).

* * *

The Internet is rapidly becoming a vast storehouse of information on philosophy as well as providing access to all the major texts of our philosophical and cultural traditions. Most university philosophy departments have websites, often with links to other philosophically interesting homepages. For those who focus on Greek speculative philosophy and literature the Perseus Project at Tufts University (http://www.perseus.- tufts.edu) is a must. There are also discussion groups which can keep you appraised of the latest debates on such thinkers as Kant and Hegel. Just E-mail to listserv@bucknell.edu and write SUBSCRIBE HEGEL-L to become a part of the Hegel discussion group.

For many connections with other organizations and sites see in particular: http://ww2.valdosta.edu/~rbarnett/phi/resource.html and Episteme Links at http://www.arrowweb.com/philo/. A colleague of my mine in Australia recently mused that the Internet may very well be a manifestation of absolute mind. Your comments are welcome, but please use the Institute’s E-mail address: isp@raynon.com.

Volume VIII Number 2

Ottawa, Canada

Fall 1996


Message from the President

Francis Peddle

This issue of ELEUTHERIA contains diverse pieces by James Lowry, Peter McCormick and myself. McCormick’s article “Reddish in Noth-ing but Night” was read in a shorter version, under the title “Reasonably Interpreting Fic­tions”, at Montreal, where there was, October 16-19, 1996, a joint annual meeting of the Canadian Society for Aesthetics and the Ameri­can Society for Aesthetics. Both societies have cordial relations with a number of scholars holding dual memberships. On occasion the two societies hold their annual meetings together here in Canada.

McCormick’s panoramic excursion through thinking about fictions, and more particularly through thinking about what counts as reason­ably interpreting fictions, goes beyond instru­mental, procedural and relativistic terms. His focus is on “the more substantive terms that specify a cardinal role for more speculative accounts of meaning, truth, and objectivity as aspects of the fictional.” Reflecting on these accounts in the poetry of suffering in the twentieth century is a principal element of McCormick’s work on philosophy, poetry and fictions.

Speculative accounts of the history of philoso­phy have traditionally formed a significant component of the major systems of speculative philosophy. James Lowry’s “Speculative Philoso­phy and the History of Philosophy” treats the two subphrases as contraries which on their own create fundamental obstacles to the perennial philosophical endeavour. Lowry maintains that followers of system-builders such as Aristotle, Aquinas or Hegel invariably become either “historical” traditionalists or “ahistorical” dogmatists. Philosophical speculation avoids this trap by working speculatively and rationally through the history of philosophy. The perennial lesson to be learned, not simply intuited, is the recognition of “the necessity of knowing what has been thought in order to think systemati­cally and anew.”

* * *

With the first publication of ELEUTHERIA in the Spring of 1989 we made available access to a computer via modem, which was left in “host” mode for a specified time one day a week. Communications technology has taken a quantum leap since then with the development of the Internet and E-mail. We now have an E-mail address: isp@raynon.com. We also hope to have a home page on the world wide web in 1997. It will primarily contain information about the Institute, ELEUTHERIA, papers on speculative philosophy and other occasional items of interest to those who keep track of what is going on in the discipline.

* * *

With the Fall issue of ELEUTHERIA we once again enclose our annual request for membership renewal. If anyone has professional questions about charitable donations for the Institute, or about how to contribute to the Insti­tute’s Endowment Fund, they should contact me.

Volume VIII Number 1

Ottawa, Canada

Spring 1996


Message from the President

Francis Peddle

This issue of ELEUTHERIA is devoted to my study of the phenomenological historicism of Johann Gustav Droysen, F. H. Bradley and Wilhelm Dilthey in the late nineteenth century. The intensification of historicist thinking during this period forms the backdrop to the nihilism of Friedrich Nietzsche and to the predominance of time and historicity in existentialist thinkers such as Martin Heidegger. The concentration in these authors on the particulars of history as indicia of inner experience illustrates the tendency, in the history of the historicization of Western thought, towards the intensification of the principle of historical expressivism and its growing prevalence over transhistorical rationality and the traditional conceptualisms that were unencumbered by the flux of historical change.

Phenomenological historicism replaces the closed metaphysical circle of traditional philosophy with the “hermeneutical circle” which is no longer representative of a finished system of thought but indicative of an epistemological direction that is indefinitely open-ended, always imperfect and historically revisable. Dilthey formulated definitively for the twentieth century the question of how the historical consciousness can, on the one hand, assert the historically conditioned character and relative validity of all its objects and, on the other, seek a science of its objects which must include universal and non-relative criteria for their investigation.

Many writers in this period were acutely aware of the contradiction between the creative and the historical consciousness. Dilthey rightly saw this contradiction as “the silently born affliction most characteristic of philosophy today.” In the contemporary philosopher creative activity is copresent with the historical consciousness, since philosophizing without this would embrace only a fragment of reality. At the same time, it is recognized that this creative activity is a part of the historical continuum, in which the philosopher consciously produces or creates something which is dependent. Historical dependency and an autonomous subjectivity are inextricable aspects of creativity.

* * *

There were a number of significant changes in the 1996 federal budget and related announcements with respect to donations to charities and income tax credits, and in the application of the federal goods and services tax, that affect the operation of non-profit organizations like the Institute of Speculative Philosophy. The government has proposed that the ceiling of 20 per cent of net income for receiptable donations to registered charitable organizations like the Institute, and charitable foundations, be increased to 50 per cent for the 1996 and subsequent taxation years. Furthermore, the limit on gifts by individuals in the year of death and the preceding year, including bequests or legacies, is being raised from 20 per cent to 100 per cent.

The Institute has never accepted direct grants from any level of government. However, in the absence of overall reform of our system of public revenue generation, we are of the view that the longstanding tax subsidization of charitable giving is an appropriate way for the community to support non-profit organizations that have as their object, for instance, the advancement of education.

The government has also declared that charitable organizations will no longer be required to pay the federal goods and services tax (GST) on its purchases. In the past GST was payable by charities and refunded 50% on application.

For many charities, especially smaller ones, this was an onerous administrative and financial burden. It was yet another example, and there are many, of how one legislative provision is defeated and nullified by another.

* * *

On behalf of my colleagues in the Institute I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate Dr. Peter McCormick, one of our founding members, on his recent nomination as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. The induction ceremony is to take place this Fall.

Volume VII Number 2

Ottawa, Canada

Fall 1995


Message from the President

Francis Peddle

I

In previous issues of ELEUTHERIA (Vol. I, Nos. 1 & 2, 1989) I had occasion to discuss the problems of accountability in the public funding of research. Whether granting agencies, such as the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC) or the Canada Council, should be subject to judicial review and whether there should be substantive appeals with respect to the administrative and adjudicative process of awarding research grants were some of the topics considered.

As part of the overall downsizing of government announced in the February, 1995 budget the SSHRCC has decreed that administrative grants to the Canadian Federation for the Humanities (CFH) and the Social Sciences Federation of Canada (SSFC) will be completely phased out over the next three years along with administrative grants to the various learned societies which are the primary constituents of the federations. At the annual meeting of the CFH in June, during the learned societies conference at the University of Quebec at Montreal, it was decided that steps be taken to combine the CFH and the SSFC into one organization. The disciplines within the SSFC have grown substantially in numbers and in the amount of public funding received in recent decades, while the traditional disciplines of philosophy, history, classics and so on have either stagnated or declined. It can only be assumed that unless stringent safeguards are built into the constitution of the new organization the humanistic disciplines will play a secondary role within it.

About seven years ago I addressed the Board of the CFH on the need to create an endowment fund because at some time in the future, difficult as it may be to determine that time, there will be an inevitable cutback in core funding to the CFH by federal the government. Shortly thereafter the Canadian Foundation for Teaching and Research in the Humanities was incorporated. Little was done, however, to raise sufficient funds to replace, on a permanent basis, a loss in core funding from the government. Now the inevitable has happened and the CFH in all likelihood will lose its autonomy and sense of focus in an organization dominated by neoteric disciplines that are mostly indifferent to theGeisteswissenschaften.

The obvious lesson in this unfortunate turn of events is that freedom of thought and economic independence are interconnected, and the absence of the latter often has overt and subtle consequences for the exercise of the former. The CFH should not amalgamate itself with the SSFC. Rather, it should take its remaining core funding over the next few years along with current reserves and convert the funds into a small, but albeit, untouchable endowment fund upon which it can slowly build future activities. It is far more important to maintain independence and purity of purpose than to seek relevance and recognition in an organization overrun by research agendas that theoretically see themselves as having long since transcended the unscientific musings of philosophers, poets and historians of ideas.

This issue of ELEUTHERIA contains articles by James Lowry and myself on the diverse writings of Alan Bloom, Francis Fukuyama, John Ralston Saul, Ayn Rand and Immanuel Kant. One cannot but be astonished at how two writers, Fukuyama and Rand, can read such utterly different philosophical agendas into German Idealism and its influence on America. For Fukuyama, the United States is the absolute state of which all other states will have to be clones. History has come to a political end and the last man has arrived. In Rand’s optimistic world-view, America has to overcome the knowledge-annihilating and the freedom-negating orientation of German Idealism, as enunciated in Kant and Hegel, in order to achieve a benevolent objectivist philosophy and civil society wherein the good and rationality are upheld by the virtues of independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness and pride. These opposing views demonstrate that the impact of Kant and Hegel on American thought is intricate and wide-ranging.

Volume VII Number 1

Ottawa, Canada

Spring 1995


Message from the President

Francis Peddle

This issue of ELEUTHERIA is devoted to Father Lawrence Dewan’s, o.p., Presidential Address to the American Catholic Philosophical Association, entitled The Importance of Truth, which was delivered on March 27, 1993, in St. Louis, Missouri, and which is reprinted here with the permission of the author. The text was also reproduced in the Annual ACPA Proceedings, of the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 76 (1993), 1-20.

Father Dewan is a noted for his scholarship on St. Thomas Aquinas. Of particular interest to Institute members is the discussion of speculative knowledge in this address. Father Dewan states:

The most perfect power is the intellect, and its most perfect object is the divine good [bonum divinum]. This is not an object of practical intellect, but rather of speculative intellect.

What are some of the defining characteristics of the “speculative intellect” and “speculative knowl­edge?” Father Dewan’s words go directly to the core of the speculative in its most original and truest sense:

Now, God’s knowledge of himself is speculative. This seems to me worth stressing, lest it be thought that speculative knowledge is

somehing which pertains to created intel­lects merely because of their finitud­e, their being surpassed by the whole of reality and by God himself.

However, in God we find speculative knowledge par excellence, and in him it is pure actuality, the most lively of activities.

My point here is that speculative knowledge is knowledge most noble because of the onto­logical status of its object, viz something intrinsically worth seeing. That object is primarily the being which is the source of all being.

Before Christianity had understood the world as creatio ex nihilo, Aristotle articulated similar characteristics of the speculative and contempla­tive life in Book Lambda (1072b20) of theMetaphysics:

Therefore the possession rather than the receptivity is the divine element which thought seems to contain, and the act of contemplation is what is most pleasant and best. If, then, God is always in that good state in which we sometimes are, this com­pels our wonder; and if in a better this compels it even more. And God is in a better state. And life also belongs to God; for the actuality of thought is life, and God is that actuality; and God’s self-dependent actuality is life most good and eternal. We say therefore that God is a living being, eternal, most good, so that life and duration continuous and eternal belong to God; for this is God.

This is perhaps one of the most celebrated and scrutinized passages in speculative philosophy. Aristotle has arrived at a discussion of the ultimate object and thoughtful act of speculative metaphysics – divine thought as a thinking, on thinking, thinking.

It is curious how modernity has thoroughly inverted and moved away from these time-hon­oured speculative ideals. Our sciences are now believed to be noble because their objects are human-centred, finite and natural. That the nobility of humanity can only be understood in the context of the eternal and divine good is no longer seen as a necessary proposition. Potentiality, in the metaphysical sense, has taken on greater force and intuitive appeal than actuality, the most crucial of metaphysical concepts. Even more fundamentally, modernity has validated only those mental activities that have as their objects something external to themselves – knowledge, perception, opinion and understanding. In speculative thought thinking is at one with its object. There is no issue as to correspondence, validation or falsification. There is no uncertainty as to whether there may or may not be a diremp­tion between what is thought and what is thought about.

Father Dewan’s address challenges us to once again take up the intellectual discipline and the ethical necessity of speculative thought and divine speculative knowledge.

Table of Contents

  • TRUTH AND HAPPINESS by Lawrence Dewan, o.p.
  • KAMAKURA DAIBUTSU – Peter McCormick

Volume VI Number 2

Ottawa, Canada

Fall 1994


Message from the President

Francis Peddle

I

In October I attended the Fourteenth Annual Conference of the Council of Georgist Organizations in Fairhope, Alabama. Situated on the idyllic eastern shore of Mobile Bay, Fairhope celebrated its centenary this year. The founders of the “colony”, as it is still referred to by many residents, were primarily Iwoan followers of the nineteenth century philosopher and economist Henry George such as E.B. Gaston and W.H. Greeno. By making land freely available to the early settlers, the original colonists believed that social justice could be historically achieved and that such an experiment had a “fair hope” of success.

The basic principle of the Fairhope utopians is still with us in a number of different guises. All people have an equal entitlement to the bounty of nature and that such opportunity cannot be circumscribed by any one person without repaying the community for such a privilege. Any monopolization of the gifts of nature must be commensurate with a reimbursement to others for being denied their proportionate share in what nature has to offer. Conversely, all people have a right to the fruits of their labour and efforts, the denial of which is a fundamental infringement of their right to property in themselves. The denial of property in ourselves and the freedom necessarily aligned with such a concept, be it through the state’s appropriation of labour income, social therapy and the ethics of society or the profusionof laws which negate both the ethics of self-perfecting and the ethics of the altruism, is one of the most singularly acute problems facing the philosophical reformation of our culture.

The Fairhope utopians sought to implement these principles through the vehicle of the Fairhope Single Tax Corporation, which leased lands in the community to settlers. This corporation is still in existence, although lands held in trust for the community are now limited and surrounded by fee simple lands in the fast-growing greater Fairhope area. Interestingly, the Fairhope pier and neighbouring beach and parkland are the only shoreline in Mobile Bay which is accessible to everyone and not owned and restricted by private interests. The colonists believed that all should be able to enjoy and revel in the sublime natural beauty of this estuary on the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico.

During the conference in Fairhope I had the opportunity to introduce a new book of mine entitled CITIES AND GREED: Taxes, Inflation and Land Inflation, which is published by the Canadian Research Committee on Taxation. I have been the Director of Research for the Committee for the past eight years. This study examines the interlocking problems which pervade our urban economies and systems of local government finance. It proposes solutions that are based on a number of the philosophical concepts espoused by the Fairhope utopians, Henry George, the physiocrats and classical economists such as Smith and Ricardo. The book is available through the Institute for $19.95 (Cdn.) or $14.95 (U.S.) plus $3.60 shipping and handling.

The current issue of ELEUTHERIA contains pieces by Peter McCormick and myself. McCormick’s piece is a revised version of an invited paper presented at the XIVth International Taniguchi Symposium in Philosophy, held in Kyoto, Japan, September 8-13, 1994. The essay on Schweitzer and Bach was originally given by me at the annual meeting of the Canadian Society for Aesthetics at McMaster University in May, 1987. I have made only marginal alterations in syntax since that conference.

The Institute now has available for purchase Volumes One and Two in its MONOGRAPH SERIES. The monographs, entitled, Speculative Philosophy and Practical Life and Psyche and Cosmos, are by James Lowry, and originally appeared in ELEUTHERIA. Each volume in the MONOGRAPH SERIES contains a Concordance and Line Numbering for easy reference. Prices per copy are available upon request.

Volume VI Number 1

Ottawa, Canada

Spring 1994


Message from the President

Francis Peddle

I

This issue of ELEUTHERIA contains the second part of James Lowry’s essay on Reason and Religion as well as the conclusion of my article on Hegel, Habermas, Piaget and Epistemology. Both articles distinguish between speculative reason and the modern appeals to what may be loosely called “quasi-rationalities”.

On April 9, 1994 the Institute held the first of a series of seminars on Plotinus’ Enneads. These seminars will concentrate on Book VI of the Enneads entitled “On the Kinds of Being”. There are three treatises on the kinds of being in the Enneads. On April 9th the seminar dealt with Chapter Two or number forty-three in Porphyry’s chronology. Chapter Two opens with a discussion of the Platonic categories of sameness, otherness, rest and motion as found in Plato’s Sophist and raises the issue of whether or not “being” itself is a category.

A substantial portion of Plotinus’ text focuses on the exclusivity of the categories. A crucial matter for exegetical insight into the text is how the interpreter is to understand Plotinus’ use of Aristotelian language and turns of phrase. It should be remembered that Neo-Platonists were required to study Aristotle before taking up Plato. The first writings of Proclus were, for example, commentaries on Aristotelian texts.

The description of Plotinus as a Neo-Platonist is misleading since even a cursory acquaintance with the Enneads reveals a wide-ranging synthesis and rearticulation of the complete history of the Greek philosophical tradition. The references are subtle and the arguments richly terraced. “On the Kinds of Being” is not simply a restatement of the Platonism of the Sophist or the Parmenides but an original metaphysics expressed in a refined and highly nuanced language.

In future issues of ELEUTHERIA we hope to publish a commentary on Plotinus that captures the work currently being undertaken in the Institute seminars.

* * *

The Institute now has available for purchase Volumes One and Two in its MONOGRAPH SERIES. The monographs, entitled, Speculative Philosophy and Practical Life and Psyche and Cosmos, are by James Lowry, and originally appeared in ELEUTHERIA. Each volume in the MONOGRAPH SERIES contains a Concordance and Line Numbering for easy reference.

Volume V Number 2

Ottawa, Canada

Fall 1993


Message from the President

Francis Peddle

I

This instalment of ELEUTHERIA contains the first part of an essay on Reason and Religion by James Lowry as well as Part One of an article by me entitled Hegel, Habermas, Piaget and Epistemology. Both articles deal with the critique of reason and knowledge that pervades the modern retreat from a single and unified concept of mind.

The Enlightenment emphasis on reason has been transformed into rationalities, perspectives and situational epistemologies. The Kantian critique of Enlightenment reason nevertheless resulted in a circumscribed doctrine of knowing. Kant laid down the objective conditions for a possible experience and a science of knowledge while postulating a scientifically impenetrable noumenal world. Hegel proceeded into this noumenal world, exposed it and its phenomenal counterpart as moments in the unfolding of the Idea, and thus brought back to any doctrine of knowing the issues of totality, unity and internal coherence.

Post-Hegelian modernity quickly lost sight of any principle of reason or knowing predicated upon a concept of truth that is necessarily allencompassing. Truth, knowing, mind and hence philosophy itself fell into a fracas of historicized doctrines, reductionisms and eventually formalized sub-disciplines. Many of these disciplines have forgot their own history and evolution. Philosophy is now slated for extinction in many of our most prestigious universities.

The essays in this issue of ELEUTHERIA show that philosophy must be unitarily rational and coherent. It is an undertaking that is prior to and comprehensive of religion and science. Modern epistemology is an attempt to be a dephilosophized doctrine of knowing that presumably will have some relevance to our socio-political and economic institutions. This is a contradiction that cannot be resolved by the assumptions of this epistemology. The same is true for religious doctrine. Only speculative philosophy sustains these contradictions while completing their resolution.

* * *

The Institute now has available for purchase at $5.00 per copy Volume One in itsMONOGRAPH SERIES. The monograph, entitled, Speculative Philosophy and Practical Life, is by James Lowry, and originally appeared in the Fall, 1990 issue ofELEUTHERIA. Each volume in the MONOGRAPH SERIES contains a Concordance andLine Numbering for easy reference.

Volume V Number 1

Ottawa, Canada

Spring 1993


Message from the President

Francis Peddle

I

This instalment of ELEUTHERIA contains two pieces on aesthetics and the philosophy of art. Mozart and the Aesthetics of Absolute Music which was first given by me at the Learned Societies Conference at Queen’s University in May, 1991 and Peter McCormick’sCrimson Words, Pale Fires of Reason: Philosophy and Poetry at the End of the Kantian Era at the XIIth International Congress in Aesthetics in Madrid in September, 1992.

Speculative philosophy has traditionally comprehended art as the immediate appearance of absolute mind. The idea of beauty is a sense-world unity of subjectivity and objectivity.

The content of art is spiritual, its form is the embodiments of the individual arts. The concrete perfection of the ideal in art is the unity of spiritual content and material form. This ideality presents itself as the infinite, free and self-determined work of art bereft of all unnecessary externalities and contingencies.

The counter-absolutism of modernity has refracted our approach to art as much as it has philosophy and religion. In its lowest manifestation art is perceived as entertainment and amusement. In education it is manipulated for its social utility. Moreover, art no longer bridges imagination and sensibility – a necessary connection in the stabilization of subjectivity. Historically, embodiment and contingency have become prior to spiritual content. Form is simply abstraction, a nonembodied reaction to oversubjectivized art.

As the first appearance of absolute mind art is primarily self-determining and this is the basic difference between it and mind as anthropology, phenomenology and psychology or as an institutional or social ethics. Art is a self-determining immediacy in which a shifting emphasis between content and form results in the particular arts and in art history as such. This issue of ELEUTHERIA explores this shifting emphasis and the immediacy of speculative thought in musical and poetic aesthetics.

* * *

The Institute now has available for purchase at $5.00 per copy Volume One in itsMONOGRAPH SERIES. The monograph, entitled, Speculative Philosophy and Practical Life, is by James Lowry, and originally appeared in the Fall, 1990 issue of ELEUTHERIA. Each volume in the MONOGRAPH SERIES contains a Concordance and Line Numberingfor easy reference.

Volume IV Number 2

Ottawa, Canada

Fall 1992


Message from the President

Francis Peddle

I

This instalment of ELEUTHERIA completes James Lowry’s series Psyche and Cosmos that began with Volume III, Number 2 in the Fall of 1991. The full article is available from the Institute as a softcover volume in its MONOGRAPH SERIES.

Reflection on the thought orientations of modernity; its spirit, limitations and false idealities, has been prevalent in the pieces appearing in this publication. How one understands modernity is today usually the mirroring of a disciplinary or historical education. Hence, the psychological, sociological and economic “modernities” that colour much of the contemporary realms of professional discourse.

The categories and conceptual referents used to circumscribe modernity range from the more universally illuminating to the fleeting empiricisms of anecdotal commentaries. The modern tendency to elevate the Aristotelian category of potentiality () above actuality (), and to ignore altogether complete reality (), forms, for example, a sounder basis for insightful reflection than the current legislative ideologies which idealize the incidental. The necessity for philosophical coherence becomes more pronounced as our socio-political languages fragment, and institutional life is increasingly subject to artificialities of contract law and brokered interests. The inevitable result is the desiccated language, as symptomatic of significantly diminished conceptual powers, of Canada’s recent constitutional forays and the spreading bankruptcy of political dialogue.

The two pieces in this issue, Roy Hanna’s review of James Robertson’s Future Wealth: a New Economics for the 21st Century and James Lowry’s Charlottetown Discord, approach modernity from the absolutized subtexts of economics and politics. Both orientations strain humanity to the limit through an excessive one-dimensionality; economics, presupposing that advances in spirituality are only possible on a material substratum, and politics assuming that consensus not conceptual rigor and internal cohesion can lead to an amelioration of institutional life. The necessity of speculative thought as a rational basis for political and economic organization will be explored in future issues of ELEUTHERIA.