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What occasioned this question and these reflections on how I might answer it were the following sentences from the chapter on "speculative philosophy" in Process and Reality:

Wiki Markup"\[Philosophy's\] ultimate appeal is to the general consciousness of what in practice we experience. Whatever thread of presupposition characterizes social expression throughout the various epochs of rational society must find its place in philosophic theory. Speculative boldness must be balanced by complete humility before logic, and before fact. It is a disease of philosophy when it is neither bold nor humble, but merely a reflection of the temperamental presuppositions of exceptional personalities" (17 \ [25\]).

Allowing, as I do, that philosophy has the existential task of answering the existential question – so as thereby to pierce the blindness, as Whitehead puts it, of activity in respect to its transcendent functions – one need not hesitate in joining Whitehead in calling for "speculative," i.e., constructive, boldness. And this is all the more so, because the constructive boldness that Whitehead calls for is not the only thing he takes to be required. Indeed, he insists that such boldness has to be balanced by complete humility before logic and before fact, which is to say, by complete humility before "whatever thread of presupposition" runs through "what in practice we experience," to the general consciousness of which philosophy, he argues, makes its ultimate appeal. But what can this mean other than appealing to the results of philosophy in its other aspect or function as analysis of presuppositions, and, centrally, as analysis of the necessary conditions of the possibility of human existence (metaphysics in the broad sense) and of any existence (metaphysics in the strict sense)?

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