Page History

SCANNED PDF

On the Distinction between "Critical" and "Speculative" Philosophy (W. A. Christian) 

1. My inclination is to say that C's distinction between "critical" and "speculative" philosophy does not correspond exactly to my distinction between the "critical-analytic" and the "constructive-synthetic" aspect or function of philosophy. (My distinction seems somewhat closer to the distinction he makes when he says, "we need to construct [sic] general theories of meaning and truth applying to all types of discourse, includ­ing moral discourse, scientific discourse, esthetic discourse, and reli­gious discourse" even while "at the same time we need to explore more thoroughly each of the particular domains of human experience and dis­course" (MIRMTR, 8). C's distinction seems, rather, to be not unrelated to the distinction I have sometimes made between "transcendental" and "cate­gorial" metaphysics. I.e. transcendental metaphysics transcendental metaphysics undertakes to de­termine the purely formal logical type that any and all our uses of "reality" and related terms such as "truth," etc. necessarily presuppose. This it does by way of an attempt to construct "regional on­tologies" on the basis of a critical analysis of the constitutive concepts and assertions of the several different "domains of truth," as well as the "fundamental ontology" of human existence as such. Withal, the sole con­cern of a transcendental metaphysics is to abstract from everything mater­ial--from any and all values of various variables--to identify the strictly formal necessary condition(s) of the possibility of all our exper­ience and thought, and hence the strictly first principles of reality as such. A categorial metaphysics, by contrast, undertakes an interpretation of interpretation of these strictly formal principles in some material terms, in terms of some of the concepts or categories of our thought and experience in the several domains of truth. For various good reasons, the most adequate categorial metaphysics will be the metaphysics whose interpretive scheme is derived from the "fundamental ontology" provided by an existentialist analysis of our own existence. But even that kind of an existentialist, or psychicalist, categorial metaphysics is still the attempt somehow to fill in the purely formal scheme of transcendental metaphysics with some material contents, which can be done, obviously, only by means of anal­ogy. 

...