E-Books →Speculations II

If the first volume of Speculations was enough of an explicit wager, a willing blind leap in the terra incognita of the publishing world, then this volume forces us to stop and evaluate the reasons for the journal's protracted existence.
This is all the more important when we consider how the range of meanings of the term 'speculative realism' seems to be growing-with increasing numbers of thinkers situating themselves in its trail, or holding a somewhat cautious interest in it-while its effective reference seems nowhere to be found. Realism is an old 'ism' that predates Kantian critiques, Cartesian doubts and perhaps even Phyrronian skepticisms. Waxing and waning throughout the ages, it has been the philosophical attempt to conceptualize a return to that 'natural' attitude which is common before any exposure to massive doses of philosophical thinking. What makes this latest instantiation of this process more than a mindless repetition is its 'speculative' side. Here to speculate means to reject the doxa of the times, both philosophical and commonsensical. In a way then to be a 'speculative realist' means-if anything- to place oneself in an interstitial position where theorizing about reality is unconstrained by the limits imposed by both common-sense and dogmatic forms of philosophical realism.