How Long to Read Studies in Contemporary Metaphysics

How Long Does it Take to Read Studies in Contemporary Metaphysics?

It takes the average reader to read Studies in Contemporary Metaphysics by R. F. Hoernlé

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From the PREFACE. The Studies contained in this volume may be described as chips from a metaphysician's workshop, or perhaps I should rather say blocks hewn out experimentally in the effort after a systematic synthesis; not unlike the painter's sketches, or the sculptor's rough modellings in clay, which precede the finished work. The day for systems, we are constantly told, is passed, but not, let us hope, the day for philosophers to continue the effort to think systematically. Much scorn has been poured on the philosophical systems which sprang into being so abundantly a hundred years ago, fit heralds of a century which has been well called, in retrospect, "the Century of Hope". We children of an age of disillusionment need to recapture something of the confidence, the speculative daring, of the great thinkers of the past. On the printed page their " systems " are apt to appear as vain attempts to imprison the rich and varied life of the world in a rigid pattern of conceptual pigeon-holes. But of their spirit, their endeavor after wholeness, their effort to think systematically, we cannot have enough. We certainly need more than we have. At any rate, the following Studies are inspired by the conviction-itself not an a priori assumption, but a conclusion slowly gathered from the business of philosophizing-that experience, taken as a whole, gives us clues which, rightly interpreted, lead to the perception of order in the universe, a graded order of varied appearances. The concepts of the "order of the universe" and-in the Platonic phrase-of the "saving of the appearances" define, between them, the ideal which I have had before me. The saving of appearances calls for a theory which enables us to appreciate each appearance for what it really is, and which exhibits each in its place among other appearances in the universe. I should be false to this conviction if I did not add that it does not seem to me alien to the practical task of meeting the varied incidents of human life with steadfast wisdom. The student surveying the multifarious tendencies and movements of contemporary thought, may well feel as if he stood at the parting of many ways, presented as alternatives for his choice. On the one side he will find himself told that the philosophic spirit is in essence subjective and sentimental, that it allows moods and desires to color its view of the world, that it rebels against the inevitable limits of human knowledge. He will be advised to turn his back on the chaos of the actual world and seek comfort amidst the eternal verities of pure reason. He will hear it said that only those subjects are fit for the philosopher's attention, in the study of which he can be ethically neutral. He may meet with the view that it has never yet been proved that the universe is not a grand, and in parts rather cruel, joke and that he who enters into the joke and plays with it, is more likely to get real insight than he who takes the universe seriously and stakes reason and happiness on its orderliness and goodness. On the other hand, he will meet with a continuous tradition in philosophy, supported by the greatest thinkers of the past, and vigorous at the present day, not from mere subservience to their authority, but because fresh generations of philosophers find the insight of their predecessors verified by their own thinking. This tradition stands for the "rationality" of the universe, not merely in the formal sense of every detail in it being subject to the law of sufficient reason, but even more in the profounder sense of its being the home of the values which we commonly call spiritual. Such, briefly, are the alternatives before the student. His choice cannot be settled by tossing. It cannot, like the choice of Buridan's ass, be unmotived. And though it be temperamental, it will not, therefore, be irrational or arbitrary....

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