In this original and illuminating work, the reader is invited to approach philosophy as an activity that can instruct, delight, and move. On this view, philosophy can be seen as a key to human education, a mastery of humane letters, and a part of the repulic of the liberal arts. Embracing this approach to philosophy, Verene argues, involves moving beyond modern philosophy's analytical encounter with experience, one that emphasizes argument and criticism at the expense of the Socratic search for self-knowledge. Relying on insights from Vico and Hegel, Verene introduces a new sense of reason, one that sees the True as the whole and that connects reason to the ancient sense of speculation. Reflection and criticism are given their due, but the reorientation of philosophy toward the speculative grasp of the whole of things allows memory, imagination, and dialectical ingenuity to take on philosophical form. In the end, this work show how speculation, symbolic form, metaphor, poetry, and rhetoric are natural parts of philosophical thinking.

Donald Phillip Verene is Charles Howard Candler Professor of Metaphysics and Moral Philosophy at Emory University.

Chapter 1 Preface
Chapter 2 Introduction
Chapter 3 The Canon of the Primal Scene in Speculative Philosophy
Chapter 4 Philosophical Pragmatics
Chapter 5 Putting Philosophical Questions (in)to Language
Chapter 6 Absolute Knowledge and Philosophical Language
Chapter 7 The Limits of Knowledge: Argument and Autobiography
Chapter 8 Philosophical Aesthetics
Chapter 9 Philosophical Memory
Chapter 10 Culture, Categories, and the Imagination
Chapter 11 Metaphysical Narration, Science, and Symbolic Form
Chapter 12 Myth and Metaphysics