On the Need for Speculative Philosophy Today

‘On the Need for Speculative Philosophy Today’ takes seriously Hegel’s claims that speculative philosophy begins in diremption and ends in higher-order conceptualization. To make Hegel’s theses more perspicuous, I examine the set of modern life needs—historical, metaphysical, phenomenological, and political—that give rise to speculative philosophy. I then attempt to show that speculative philosophy’s ultimate aim is to provide us with higher-order consolation. In the final section, I mean to draw on the second sense of speculation, conjecturing that rational form of inquiry I have undertaken is a propaedeutic to ‘philosophies of action’: philosophy of life and public philosophy.