Abusing Aristotle

‘Speculative’ in contemporary usage often denotes something that is not grounded in fact, not based in the “actual world.” This is a term of suspicion for some (as in the phrase “merely speculative”) and of approval for others (as in the introduc-tion to Towards Speculative Realism, where the philosopher Graham Harman asserts that “speculative” serves as a kind of homeopathic inoculation of realism, ensuring that realism is not equated with an interest in “a dull commonsense realism of genuine trees and billiard balls existing outside the mind, but a darker form of ‘weird realism’ bearing little resemblance to the presuppositions of everyday life”).1 Yet in medieval scholastic usage, this term was frequently used to denote the very material science of physics, a science whose goal was to describe and analyze everyday experience, the “dull com-monsense realism” of things. Ockham, in the prologue to his commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, describes the overlap be-tween physics and metaphysics, asserting that physics is also “primarily speculative.”2 Thus, for Ockham and his contem-poraries, looking at a rock was just as speculative an endeavor as imagining how that rock was transformed by your looking into a mental or intentional object. What I find useful about the recent turn to speculative realism is that it reminds us of the speculative nature of both the physical sciences and moral philosophy. This paper is in part a meditation on how the “specters of Aristotle” (pace Derrida) haunt the modern intel-lectual divide that seeks to partition off the “dull” physical world from our metaphysical engagement with it.