The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 1867-1893 (review)

Founded and edited by William Torrey Harris in St. Louis, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy was published in its initial series from 1867-1893. As such, JSP was the first scholarly journal in the English language without a specific theological agenda. It's program was also thoroughly interdisciplinary, aiming to devote one-third of the journal to philosophy (broadly defined to include psychology and other social sciences), one-third to art, and one-third to religion. In addition to original essays, the journal included translations of German and ancient Greek philosophers (especially Aristotle and the German idealists) and commentaries on literature and music (especially Shakespeare, Goethe, and Beethoven).

Through this strategy of joining the contemporary and classical thought available to American readers, Harris hoped to develop an original, organic, first-rate philosophical tradition in America. Considering the fact that Charles Peirce, William James, G. Stanley Hall, Josiah Royce, and John Dewey all published essays in JSP, this strategy may be seen as successful. But this success, as Harris anticipated it in his 1867 "Preface" to the journal, would be the success of philosophic thought in America and not the rise of a distinctively American philosophy: "To think, in the highest sense, is to transcend all natural limits—such, for example, as national peculiarities, defects in culture, distinctions in Race, habits, and modes of living—to be universal, so that one can dissolve away the external hull and seize the substance itself. . . . Our province as Americans is to rise to purer forms than have hitherto been attained, and thus speak a 'solvent word' of more potency than those already uttered. If this be the goal we aim at, it is evident that we can find no other means so well adapted to rid of us our own idiosyncrasies as the study of the greatest thinkers of all ages and all times" (xxii).

If Harris sought in his journal to transcend all natural limits and peculiarities of time and place, this at least is where he began. In his "To the Reader" comments that opened Volume 1, Number 1 in 1867, Harris located the need for the new journal in ongoing revolutions in religious movements, ongoing revolutions in social and political life, and ongoing revolutions in science. Speculative thought and the cultivation of its insights, he asserted, can deepen religious faith, comprehend the free actions of individuals and the laws of the State, and interpret the domain of physics after "the day of simple empiricism is past" (1). Harris sought to explicate this in the journal's first article, "The Speculative." Linking the speculative to the movement from hypothesis to unhypothetical principle, and from images to ideas themselves, Harris claimed that among the great philosophers there is almost "complete unanimity, not only with respect to the transcendency of the Speculative, but also with reference to the content of its knowing." He continued: "Not only do speculative writers agree among themselves as to the nature of things, and the destiny of man and the world, but their results furnish us in the form of pure thought what the artist has wrought out in the form of beauty. . . . Its function is mediation; a continual degrading of the sensuous and external, and an elevation to the supersensual and internal" (2-3). Citing Plato and Hegel in particular, he added: "All positive forms, all forms of immediateness or being, all forms of identity, are self-relations, consisting of a negative or relative, relating to itself. But the most wonderful side of this is the fact that since this relation is that of the negative, it negates itself in its very relation, and hence its identity is a producing of non-identity. Identity and distinction are produced by the self-same process and thus self-determination is the origin of all identity and distinction likewise. This...