Project MUSE®: The Journal of Speculative Philosophy - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/104
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy.daily12026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 13, no. 2 (1999);
Vol. 14 (2000) through current issueLatest Articles: The Journal of Speculative PhilosophyTWOProject MUSE®The Journal of Speculative Philosophy1527-93830891-625XLatest articles in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy. Feed provided by Project MUSE®On Promising
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986901
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I think I was about three days into grad school when I first read the opening lines of Emmanuel Levinas’s Totality and Infinity: “Everyone will readily agree that it is of the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by morality” (1969, 21). While this was a question I had often taken up, it was not one I had yet taken seriously. In my years as an undergrad I had spent most of my time cultivating a deep suspicion toward any pretense of moral authority, quietly believing, as was the norm for disaffected suburban youth of my generation, that most people were full of shit. Admittedly, philosophy may not have been the best thing for me at the time. I can still recall how my first philosophy class left me
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/104/image/coversmallOn Promising2026-03-27text/htmlen-USOn Promising2026-03-272026TWOProject MUSE®369962026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-03-27To Be Honest
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986902
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One can also be undignified and flattering toward a virtue.Introducing me for a lecture, my friend Rob Metcalf once declared, “He goes to eleven.” My poor parents. I don’t exactly remember when I realized I was earnest, or that I was unusually so. It didn’t take too long. But “earnest” is not a word for the young, so I more grew into it through the looks of others than cried “Eureka!” Regardless, the dawning sense that I was sincere, serious, and intense didn’t temper me and I’m unsure it could have. But it did prompt me to come by it honestly and so I began to measure myself with the thought that, wherever I am, I should be fully there. But where am I? Who else, what else, is there? And if there is more than one
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/104/image/coversmallTo Be Honest2026-03-27text/htmlen-USTo Be Honest2026-03-272026TWOProject MUSE®630902026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-03-27Wild Signs and Sign-Mastery: John Durham Peters’s Creative Appropriation of Classical Pragmatism
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986903
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What the anthropologist Tim Ingold has been to several of my past endeavors (Colapietro 2015, 2017), the communication theorist John Durham Peters will be to my endeavor on this occasion. It is valuable for philosophers to cultivate not only “a sociological imagination” (MacIntyre 1985, 7) but also a historical, anthropological, and other forms of imagination; and the most effective way to do so is to be in deep, sustained conversations with sociologists, anthropologists, historians, and indeed communication theorists (cf. Foucault 1989, 41). Peters is even more philosophically literate than Ingold and far more deeply conversant with the classical American pragmatists. In fact, William James, Josiah Royce, Josiah
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/104/image/coversmallWild Signs and Sign-Mastery: John Durham Peters’s Creative Appropriation of Classical Pragmatism2026-03-27text/htmlen-USWild Signs and Sign-Mastery: John Durham Peters’s Creative Appropriation of Classical Pragmatism2026-03-272026TWOProject MUSE®674942026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-03-27“Slender Roots Suffuse Clay”: Events, Poetic Meaning, and Resilience Under Darkening Skies
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986904
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In late September 2024, Hurricane Helene chewed and roiled and spat its way across the American Southeast. Bright swirls of primary color splashed across meteorological depictions cast the event, if inadvertently, as mere scientific anomaly—an emaciated image when compared to the almost sublime visions of destruction featured in helicopter shots and amateur footage of affected areas. Asheville underwater. The tiny mountain towns of North Carolina—Chimney Rock, Marshall, so many more—awash in debris, the storm clearing to mud-slicked floors and crumbled infrastructure. A brief window of extreme weather reducing lives, communities, and complex histories to tremendous volumes of wet rubbish.These dark images are not
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/104/image/coversmall“Slender Roots Suffuse Clay”: Events, Poetic Meaning, and Resilience Under Darkening Skies2026-03-27text/htmlen-US“Slender Roots Suffuse Clay”: Events, Poetic Meaning, and Resilience Under Darkening Skies2026-03-272026TWOProject MUSE®450962026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-03-27Meliorism and Metaphysics
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986905
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In the introduction to his celebrated book Individuals (1959), Peter F. Strawson famously distinguished between descriptive and revisionary metaphysics: “Descriptive metaphysics is content to describe the actual structure of our thought about the world, revisionary metaphysics is concerned to produce a better structure” (Strawson [1959] 1993, 9). Strawson’s own project in Individuals is one of descriptive rather than revisionary metaphysics. Descriptive metaphysics, he explains, seeks to “lay bare the most general features of our conceptual structure” (Strawson [1959] 1993, 9). In contrast to revisionary metaphysics understood as “an instrument of conceptual change,” descriptive metaphysics identifies and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/104/image/coversmallMeliorism and Metaphysics2026-03-27text/htmlen-USMeliorism and Metaphysics2026-03-272026TWOProject MUSE®782362026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-03-27