Speculation (philosophy)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Speculation (from Latin speculari ' to observe' ) is a philosophical way of thinking to arrive at knowledge by going beyond conventional empirical or practical experience and focusing on the nature of things and their first principles . The Greek term "theoria" (contemplation) was translated in Latin as "speculatio" and also meant "contemplatio" .

Hans Reichenbach , who advocates a "scientific philosophy", considers speculation to be the transitional period in which philosophers ask questions that they cannot yet answer with existing logical means. In colloquial language, too, speculation is understood on the one hand in the sense that claims are made that lack a rational basis. On the other hand, speculation is used in everyday language when it comes to statements that may only turn out to be incorrect or correct in the future. Karl Popper defends speculative thinking as a way of arriving at theories. In order for them to be accepted as "scientific", however, they must be examined critically. Similar applies to Paul Lazarsfeld for Empirical Social Research : Statistical results can only be obtained as responses to previous speculation.

Augustine

In De Trinitate (XV, VIII 14, IX 15) Augustine reinterpreted the term in deliberate delimitation from tradition: With reference to 1 Cor. 13, 12 ( we now see through a mirror in a puzzling way, but then face to face) and 2 Cor. 3, 18 he derived it from "speculum" (mirror ). In speculation man see the truth as in a dark mirror. This mirror is darkened due to the fall of man, and man himself, as a spiritual being and as an image of God, represents the mirror that can become brighter through believing turning to God. The term is here transformed with elements of the Neo-Platonic doctrine of emanation .

scholasticism

In scholasticism , speculation as the knowledge of things in God through the concepts of thinking becomes the form of knowledge per se. Human, discursive thinking can be traced back to the highest concepts ( transcendentalism ), through which it can participate in intuitive divine thinking. Therefore the formal procedure ( syllogism ) plays a major role in scholasticism , through which the human being does not understand the essence of things directly, but in a mediated way.

Ockham

In overcoming the universal dispute , Wilhelm von Ockham removed the basis of the scholastic understanding of speculation. In place of the mediation of knowledge through participation in divine intuition, he put the immediate intuitive knowledge of the individual things, which runs parallel to sensory perception. With this, Ockham prepared modern empiricism , which opposes speculation.

Kant

Kant stands in the tradition of the empirical point of view. For him, speculative reason is understood as a kind of transcendent use of reason in contrast to the immanent use of nature . According to Kant, this speculation cannot produce any empirical knowledge, which only immanent reason can do.

“A theoretical knowledge is speculative if it relates to an object or such concepts of an object, which cannot be reached in any experience. It is opposed to the knowledge of nature, which does not apply to any objects or predicates of the same than those which can be given in a possible experience. [...] If one now infer their cause from the existence of things in the world, then this does not belong to the natural, but to the speculative use of reason: "

- Immanuel Kant : Critique of Pure Reason

In the speculative use of reason, man deals with questions which he can only conceptually grasp a priori . These are in particular the questions about God, freedom and the immortality of the soul, which Kant called regulative ideas. It is part of the essence of reason, which strives to understand the world as a whole, that man cannot reject these questions, although it is clear to him that there is no empirical explanation for this. Man cannot do without speculation about the world as a whole. He just has to be aware of it.

Hegel

In German idealism rehabilitation of the speculative concept began.

For Hegel , speculation is the specific element of philosophy that is "committed to comprehending knowledge." For Hegel, speculation is always defined by the fact that it represents the wholeness, as which individuals, by virtue of their reason, transform their everyday life and thinking into a respective world - and develop self-understanding, also able to grasp in this totality and bring to consciousness as a self-determined unit. As a counter-term to philosophical action, he regards "isolated reflection".

The reasoning thinking of Kant is still completely caught in the subject-object split . It takes the point of view of the subject and declares it to be absolute. Hegel describes Kant and Fichte's positions as "subjective idealism" which misses the ideality of the finite because he himself clings to a finite opposition. With the ideality of the finite, Hegel alludes firstly to the fact that it is not independent, that is, posited by something else, and thus only represents a moment of the infinite. Second, for him, the ideal is the concrete or "truthful". In this, things are only moments.

For Hegel, a sentence in the form of an ordinary judgment is not suitable for expressing speculative truths. There the identity of subject and predicate is recorded and abstracted from the fact that they still have several determinations. Thus the non-identical also constitutes an essential element of their relationship to one another. In the speculative proposition, the identity of the relationship between subject and predicate is asserted and at the same time their difference from one another is recorded. Speculative philosophizing succeeds only those who are capable of considering the categories and the concept in their self-movement. In this thinking all moments are idealized and brought back into unity.

“Speculative philosophy is the awareness of the idea so that everything is understood as an idea; but the idea is the truth in thought, not as mere intuition or representation. What is true in thought is more precisely that it is concrete, set in itself as divided, and indeed in such a way that the two sides of the divided are opposing thought-determinations, as the unity of which the idea must be grasped. To think speculatively means to dissolve something real and to oppose it in such a way that the differences according to thought determinations are opposite and the object is understood as a unity of both. "

Feuerbach

For Ludwig Feuerbach , the term speculative philosophy was a synonym for Hegel's philosophy, a closed system into which the idea of ​​a non-objective, otherworldly ( transcendent ) God is rationally and theoretically resolved. While the theist imagines God as outside reason , in speculative philosophy God loses his objective character and becomes thinking reason itself.

“The essence of speculative philosophy is nothing other than the rationalized, realized, made present essence of God. Speculative philosophy is the true, the consistent, the reasonable theology. "

Feuerbach wanted to break away from this speculation. The object of his criticism is the absolute idealism of Hegel as a consequent continuation of the subjective idealism of Fichte and the philosophy of Kant. Against this he set materialism and the anthropological approach to people. For him God is not a superordinate authority, but a product of human thought.

“Things must not be thought of in any other way than how they appear in reality. What is separate in reality should not be identical in thought either. The exception of thinking, of the idea - of the intellectual world among the Neoplatonists - from the laws of reality is the privilege of theological arbitrariness. The laws of reality are also laws of thought. "

Peirce

Charles Sanders Peirce divided his semiotics into speculative grammar, logical criticism and speculative rhetoric. For him, the word “speculative” was synonymous with “theoretical”.

  • Speculative grammar examines the possible types of characters and their possible combinations.
  • Logical criticism deals with the question of correct justification.
  • Speculative rhetoric is the study of the effective use of signs (the question of the cost-effectiveness of research).

Whitehead

Alfred North Whitehead himself describes the organic philosophy as speculative .

“Speculative reason is essentially free from methodological restrictions. Their function is to go beyond the limited reasons to the general reasons and to understand the totality of all methods as coordinated by the nature of things - a nature of things that can only be understood by crossing all methodological barriers. The limited intelligence of humans is never enough to ever really achieve this infinite ideal. "

Speculation is a method of making progress in thinking.

“It is part of the nature of speculation that it goes beyond the facts immediately given. Your task is to let your thinking work creatively into the future; and it does this by looking at ideas that include what is observable. "

For Whitehead, the binding of speculation to the observable is a fundamental requirement. "The priority of the factual over thinking means that there should still be a certain amount of truth even in the boldest upsurges of speculative thinking." In his main metaphysical work, Process and Reality , he therefore emphasizes that speculative philosophy is based on the knowledge of the natural sciences is bound. It must be both coherent (self-contained) and adequate (applicable). “Everything that is found in 'practice' must lie within the range of the metaphysical description.” Against this background, it is the task of metaphysics to generate a speculative holistic view of the world that cannot result from the approach of a single natural science. Whitehead's speculative hypothesis is to view the whole world as a process that takes place dynamically in a network of relations like in an organism .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hans Reichenbach: The rise of scientific philosophy . Friedrich Vieweg & Sohn Verlag, Braunschweig 2nd ed. 1968 ( The Rise of Scientific Philosophy . University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles 1951). P. 6
  2. ↑ a b Karl R. Popper: The world of Parmenides. The origin of European thought. (Ed. Arne F. Petersen, collaboration with Jørgen Mejer): Piper Munich Zurich 2005. ISBN 3-492-24071-2 . P. 38f
  3. ^ Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, Hazel Gaudet: The People's Choice. How the Voter Makes up his Mind in a Presidential Campaign . Columbia University Press: New York, London 3rd ed. 1968, (first 1944). P. 42.
  4. ↑ Kant: AA III, Critique of Pure Reason. korpora.zim.uni-duisburg-essen.de, accessed on November 3, 2019 .
  5. ^ Paul Cobben [et al.] (Ed.): Hegel-Lexikon. WBG, Darmstadt 2006, p. 415
  6. ↑ Rainer Adolphi: Speculative justification and substantive knowledge in the practical philosophy of Hegel. Investigations on the Jena philosophy of mind, on its method and development. Bouvier Verlag, Bonn 1989. ISBN 3-416-02179-7 . [Berlin (West), Univ. Diss., 1985]. P. 35f.
  7. ^ Paul Cobben [et al.] (Ed.): Hegel-Lexikon . WBG, Darmstadt 2006, p. 262ff.
  8. ↑ cf. GWF Hegel: Science of Logic I , vol. 5/20, stw, Frankfurt am Main 1986, p. 93, note 2
  9. ↑ cf. Paul Cobben [et al.] (Ed.): Hegel-Lexikon. WBG, Darmstadt 2006, p. 415
  10. ↑ GWF Hegel: Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion I , Vol. 16/20, stw, Frankfurt am Main 1986, p. 30.
  11. ↑ Ludwig Feuerbach: Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, § 5, in: Small philosophical writings (1842-1845). Leipzig 1950, 87-88
  12. ↑ Ludwig Feuerbach: Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, § 45, in: Small philosophical writings (1842-1845). Leipzig 1950, 158
  13. ^ Alfred North Whitehead: The Function of Reason . Reclam, Stuttgart 1974, 53
  14. ^ Alfred North Whitehead: The Function of Reason . Reclam, Stuttgart 1974, 68
  15. ^ Alfred North Whitehead: The Function of Reason . Reclam, Stuttgart 1974, 66
  16. ^ Alfred North Whitehead: Process and Reality . from the English by Hans Günter Holl. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1987, 48