Meditation 52: Philosophical Speculation

What is philosophical speculation? Historically, it has been associated with the wilder flights of metaphysical fancy. Plato speculates that ultimate reality is one of Pure Forms. Aristotle speculates that an Unmoved Mover must exist if Prime matter is to move at all. A string of Jewish, Christian and Muslim philosophers speculate that God exists somehow 'beyond' anything we can humanly be said to understand. Such words as 'faith' and 'revelation' point directly to a transcendent Reality.  We speculate about things when we do not really know what they are.  Speculation is a kind of inspired guesswork. In philosophy, it occurs when science seems unable, even in principle, to answer the questions we want to ask.

It has been speculated that God exists, that human beings have immortal souls, possessed of free will as a power of self-originating choice, that the universe has a cause, and that morality can be derived from God's rules or reason itself.  None of these things can be proved or disproved scientifically, and it has been argued that they are therefore more a matter of irrational conviction than reasoned argument.

                                                                             

When thinkers discovered the power of reason in the scientific revolution of the 16^th Century, extravagant claims were made.  Thinkers as diverse as Descartes, Leibniz, speculated about the ultimate nature of Substance and believed that reason can pierce the veil of appearances and shine a light on the inner workings of nature.  A skeptical philosophical reaction against speculation grew up at this time and still lingers in the philosophical community today. Perhaps it is a case of once bitten, twice shy. Francis Bacon, the father of empirical science, talks about the need to tie down the wings of speculation.  He thinks unbridles speculation leads to idolatry, mysticism and worse.  Yet without philosophical speculation about the things we want to discuss, but which we still do not fully understand, how are we going to talk about them?  We must allow imagination back into philosophy, to untie the philosophical imagination, but this time with more awareness of the playful nature of our investigations and the difficulty of claiming definitive knowledge in the realm of philosophical speculation. Knowledge may indeed be the province of science, but free thinking is that of philosophy.