Essays in Metaphysics and Moral Philosophy

The essays in this volume bring forth perspectives on the concept of philosophy, the history of philosophy, and the nature of humane education advanced by Donald Phillip Verene in his teaching and his writings. The essays are by former students. Verene approaches philosophy through Giambattista Vico's New Science concerning the Common Nature of the Nations, G.W.F. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, Ernst Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, and James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. From Vico he takes the principle of "imaginative universals," from Hegel the principle of the "speculative sentence," from Cassirer the principle of "symbolic form," and from Joyce the principle of "two thinks at a time."

Verene sees philosophy as a kind of literature. Philosophy, like poetry, exists through words. Speculative philosophy is a way of thinking that is to be placed above critical philosophy. Speculative philosophy leads to taking up philosophy as a way of life that involves the pursuit of the interconnection of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. This pursuit stands against the dominance of technology over the transcendent sense of the really real, of the forms of consciousness that lead to "absolute knowledge" and to the sense of the True as the whole.