Category Archives: Eleutheria

Ottawa, Canada

Fall 1999

Message from the President

Francis Peddle

The relationship between speculative philosophy and the organization of civil society, between philosophical economics and ecological equilibrium has not been systematically developed in modernity. Philosophers, such as Kant and Hegel, would not have imagined how a residual science such as economics, could spiral off into an unbridled Pythagoreanism or how ethics could collapse into that to which it is applied. The fragmentation of the intellectual disciplines is as much the adoption of other values, of mathematics, of hypothetico-deduction, of proof and of manipulative engineering, as it is isolation and xenophobia.

There are two recently published antidotes to these developments, Arundhati Roy’s The Cost of Living and Dierdre McCloskey’s The Vices of Economists. The former is an architect writing about the diabolical absurdities of big dam construction and population displacement in the Narmada Valley in India, the latter a professional economist who rails against statistical significance, blackboard proofs and social, or rather, people engineering that perversely dominate her chosen discipline. While few writers today have the historical and philosophical perspective, much less the perseverance, to elaborate a metaphysics out of their painfully won insights, these authors, in their thin volumes, manage to coalesce a world-view that shatters much conventional wisdom. The Cost of Living, especially, combines an informed non-fictional narrative with a powerful, poetic style that intuitively applies many of the philosophical and economic principles of Henry George. Towards the end of The Greater Common Good (pp.80-81), in The Cost of Living, she intones:

The Cost of Living, especially, combines an informed non-fictional narrative with a powerful, poetic style that intuitively applies many of the philosophical and economic principles of Henry George. Towards the end of The Greater Common Good (pp.80-81), inThe Cost of Living, she intones:

Big Dams are to a nation’s “development” what nuclear bombs are to its military arsenal. They’re both weapons of mass destruction. They’re both weapons governments use to control their own people. Both twentieth-century emblems that mark a point in time when human intelligence has outstripped its own instinct for survival. They’re both malignant indications of a civilization turning upon itself. They represent the severing of the link, not just the link – the understanding – between human beings and the planet they live on. They scramble the intelligence that connects eggs to hens, milk to cows, food to forests, water to rivers, air to life, and the earth to human existence.

This issue of ELEUTHERIA contains Part IV, the final instalment, of “Metaphysic and Dialectic: Ancient and Modern” by James Lowry. It is expected that this series will be published by the Institute as a Monograph. Also in this issue are some reflections on Hegel’s Concept of Denken by Mark Nyvlt, who is currently doing a Ph.D. in philosophy at Boston University, and working primarily in the area of the relationship between Hegel and Aristotle.

* * *

Ottawa, Canada

Spring 1999

Message from the President

Francis Peddle

Occasionally I am the recipient of various discussions and controversies via what is now known as Internet listservers. This form of communication can be most valuable. As always it depends on the quality and tone of the individual submissions. “Netiquette” is obviously still in its early stages of refinement. There is something about the spontaneity of the Internet, without the social restrictions of face to face contact, that seems to grant participants a linguistic license which often borders on the obstreperous. There are now listservers for almost every type of philosophical discourse – some freewheeling and anarchic, others controlled by various rules decreed by the manager of the listserver.

I was struck recently while on one listserver of how prevalent the temptation is for philosophy students to seek out secondary literature before they had even begun to study an original text. There were even requests for secondary literature from particular perspectives, such as an analytical reading of Hegel’s Logic or a post-modern interpretation of Kant. The pitfalls associated with reviewing secondary literature before one has a thorough understanding of the original text are obvious and need no repeating here. It appears to me, however, that the philosophical condemnation of such practices is neither common nor fashionable. Graduate students therefore feel no hesitation in making such admissions and requests. There is now no disciplinary shame in confessing your intentions to read this literature as a modus vivendi to allegedly understanding Plato or Aristotle.

There are several possible remedies to this situation. Quotations from secondary sources in term papers will result in demerits not advancement. The sighting and citation of secondary literature in classroom discussions will be strictly forbidden. Professors deeply immersed in such practices will have to exercise restraint. Survey courses based on textbooks designed primarily by the larger commercial publishing houses should be eliminated from all curricula. Finally, the classroom mantra at the beginning of every semester will be the understanding of the text through individual study, effort and reflection. Let the students know that they are usually capable enough.

* * *

This issue of ELEUTHERIA contains Part III of “Metaphysic and Dialectic: Ancient and Modern” by James Lowry and “F.W.J. von Schelling and Post-Hegelian Nihilism” by Francis Peddle which are continuations of essays published in Volume X, Number 2, Fall, 1998. F.W.J. von Schelling is the last representative of classical German Idealism before its disintegration as a philosophical force around the middle of the nineteenth century. He remained an idealist all his life. His philosophical writings have enjoyed a considerable resurgence in recent decades.

As an interpreter of Hegel he was astute, conceptually rigorous and often prophetic of later developments for which a critical understanding of the import of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences is a necessary prerequisite. With his invocation of a positive philosophy, and his preoccupation with Naturphilosophie, as opposed to Hegel’s negative rationalism, many modern writers see him as more exemplary of a form of modern existentialism than as an idealist. The following essay is primarily concerned with the issue of Schelling’s understanding of the role of nothing in relation to the Absolute in Hegel, and philosophy in general, and the implications this has for modern nihilism.

Ottawa, Canada

Fall 1998

Message from the President

Francis Peddle

With this issue of ELEUTHERIA the Institute completes its tenth year of publication. It is noteworthy that the first volume in the Spring of 1989 contained an announcement that the scholarly and philosophical work of the Institute would be accessible by members while a computer was in “host” mode on Monday evenings between 7:00 and 10:00pm. The intervening years have witnessed an unheard proliferation of journals, semi-journals, newsletters, monographs, bulletins and assorted intellectual efforts. Then in recent years the Internet, E-mail, electronic journals, philosophical news services and websites have supplanted much traditional publishing. Many of the well known print journals still retain their prestige and honour. Their permanency may, however, be somewhat less resilient than those wanting publication within may surmise.

Financial considerations are not the only reasons driving these developments. There is an air of democracy, of freedom and anarchic revelry on the Internet that is almost irresistible. Its blandishments are what one cares to make of them, without the coercive rot and peer group sidling that bedevils much of institutional scholastic life. As a cursory acquaintance with the history of ideas reveals, most great writing, such as Giambattista Vico’s New Science or Henry George’s Progress and Poverty , have been Sisyphean exercises in self-publication. Conventional wisdom dismisses vanity publishing. It is nonetheless integral to our cultural and philosophical traditions. If the Internet lightens the task of the mute Beethovens, Platos and Dantes lurking in our midst, then it is worthy of support and respect.

In the near future the Institute will have a website and join the ranks of global instantaneity and but hopefully not spontaneity – one of the Internet’s more beguiling but counter-intellectual attributes. It is not yet clear if humanity has moved on to another sequence, or perhaps moment, in the articulation of absolute mind. Certainly technology as an external force and instrumentality must always remain subordinate to our moral and spiritual consciousness.

* * *

In Volume IX, Number 2, Fall 1997 I declared our intention to produce the ten volumes ofELEU­THERIA in a bound edition. The Board of Directors has since then revisited this issue and has decided to reproduce selected thematic essays to be published in theMonograph Series . ELEUTHERIA has evolved over the years from its original inception as a more philosophical newsletter to a philosophical journal with the occasional reference to newsworthy items relevant to Institute activities. Issues of the Monograph Series will be announced herein with the usual discounts to Institute members.

* * *

This issue of ELEUTHERIA contains the continuation of articles by James Lowry and myself of essays published in Volume X, Number 1, Spring, 1998 and Volume IX, Number 2, Fall, 1997 respectively. The metaphysical problem of dialectic as understood by the ancients requires the suspension of modern scientific and Christian assumptions. To confront the metaphysics of modernity through Kant and Hegel also necessitates a thorough survey of the many presuppositions associated with the concept of nothing. How one can reconcile or metaphysically integrate the ancients and the moderns, if such a reconciliation is possible, is an important undertaking of speculative philosophy.

Ottawa, Canada

Spring 1998

Message from the President

Francis Peddle

In Hegel’s Dialectic , Hans-Georg Gadamer, one of the foremost philosophers of the twentieth cen-tury, states:

It seems to be a fundamental trait of philo­sophical consciousness in the nineteenth century that it is no longer conceivable apart from historical consciousness.

The inherent antinomial nature of reason awoke Kant from his dogmatic slumber. The post-Kant­ian development of philosophy is primarily an odyssey of the increasing historicity of truth. While this development diminished faith in the universal validity of philosophy it did not eradicate the conviction that thought could somehow dwell outside of time. The result was the formation of a fifth underlying antinomy of reason in which the thesis asserted the possibility of scientific and philosophical truth, while the antithesis presented an unbounded historical relativism based on the radical historicity of subjectivity and objectivity. Hence the source of most contemporary dogma­tisms and scepticisms.

Kant’s four antinomies originated in inferential and syllogistic reasoning. They are circumscribed by reason’s higher powers and are not in any sense destructive of the rational faculty itself. Recognition of the mutual validity of thesis and antithesis renders nugatory a constitutive employ­ment of the transcendental cosmological ideas. Reason is protected from the darker onslaught of its own possible self-annihilation as long as it is delimited to a regulatory function.

The fifth antinomy of post-Kantian modernity juxtaposes reason and anti-reason, universal valid-ity and historical relativism. However, in this antinomy thesis and antithesis are not innocent and mutually plausible adversaries. The assertion of one necessarily undermines the foundation of the other. This total incompatibility is rooted in the fact that if truth is irretrievably historicized, then universal transhis­torical validity is not ration-ally enter­tainable as a possibility, unlike the inferences reason makes in the antheses of Kant’s original four antinomies.

The antithesis in the primary antinomy of post-Kantian thought declares that a human being can never stand outside of time and history. A trans-historical absolute is unattainable. Does such an affirmation of the historicity of consciousness necessarily entail a thoroughgoing denial of rationality and lead to nihilism? And is such an antithesis inextricably dependent upon and sur-reptitiously assumptive of the universal reason which it denounces? Denying the possibility of positing something outside of time and history may very well necessarily presuppose certain logical and formal structures of thinking that are indeed unrevisable and atemporal. The proofs of the antinomy of modernity would therefore seem to involve the same assumptions of their opposites as are found in the Kantian cosmologi­cal proofs.

Speculative metaphysics must not simply confront the crisis of historical relativism, radical historicism and the question of whether or not historical existence per se has any meaning. It is conclusion­ary as much as it is heuristic, critical and reflec­tive. This is a perennial mandate even though historicity as such often disguises and sidetracks our metaphysical endeavours.

Ottawa, Canada

Fall 1997

Message from the President

Francis Peddle

This issue of ELEUTHERIA contains a series of book reviews by Peter McCormick on Japanese philosophy and culture, and a piece by myself on Kant’s “Amphiboly of the Con­cepts of Reflection.” Next year will be the tenth anniversary of the publication of ELEU-­THERIA . The Board of Directors has decided to publish a bound copy of all ten volumes, or twenty issues, with an introductory essay on the role of speculative philosophy in moder­nity. Those members wishing to order copies in advance should contact the Institute as only a limited number will be published.

* * *

The Dominican College of Philosophy and Theology, where James Lowry and myself are professors, recently inaugurated a Ph.D. program in philosophy. We think this program is unique in its concentration on the history of philosophy, the theory of the history of philosophy, metaphysics, value theory and philosophical anthropology. The description states that “the programme is designed so that the more traditional history of philosophy courses tie in with the theory of the history of philosophy courses and so that both will intersect with themes in metaphysics.” For more information about the Ph.D. program please contact the Chairperson of the Philosophy Department, Gabor Csepregi at (613) 233-5696. The Dominican College will celebrate its centenary in the year 2000.

As reported in the last issue the Internet is rapidly becoming a vast storehouse of information on philosophy. It now provides access to all the major texts of our philosophical and cultural traditions. We will regularly update our readership on philosophical resources on the Internet that are of particular interest to speculative philosophy and the objectives of the Institute. A particularly useful site is a hypertext version of Norman Kemp Smith’s translation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason at http://www. arts.cuhk. edu.hk/Philosophy/Kant/cpr. This web site is especially valuable for scholars, and those engaged in graduate work on Kant, because it allows for word searches of the English text. Another excel­lent site, organized by topic, with links to an extensive range of philosophical information, is Philosophy in Cyberspace at http://www.personal.monash.edu.au/~dey/phil/index.htm. As any user of the Internet knows once you get on-line you can go just about anywhere with enough persistence. I encourage mem­bers who utilize the Internet to send us via E-mail their web site recommendations.

* * *

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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