Collected Essays in Speculative Philosophy

James Bradley was Professor of Philosophy at Memorial University of Newfoundland from 1988-2012, and Head of the Department from 2003 until his death in 2012. Sean J. McGrath is Professor of Philosophy and Theology at Memorial University of Newfoundland and a Member of the College of the Royal Society of Canada. He is the author of The Philosophical Foundations of the Late Schelling: The Turn to the Positive (EUP, 2021), Thinking Nature. An Essay in Negative Ecology (EUP, 2019), The Dark Ground of Spirit: Schelling and the Unconscious(Routledge, 2012), Heidegger. A Very Critical Introduction (William B. Eerdmans, 2008) and The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy (Catholic University of America Press, 2006). He is editor of The Palgrave Macmillan Handbook to Schelling (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2020), Rethinking German Idealism (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2016) and A Companion to Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Religious Life (Rodopi, 2010).

Weaving together published articles with never-before published materials, Essays in Speculative Philosophy reveals for the first time the depth and breadth of James Bradley’s philosophical thought, and how much was lost with his untimely death. These essays are valuable not only for the insightful and novel contributions they make to the understanding of often-overlooked aspects of the thought of philosophers such F. H. Bradley, A. N. Whitehead and C. S. Peirce, but because, taken together, they reveal an eminent thinker making novel advances in metaphysics.

• Preface; Creative Order: James Bradley’s Speculative Metaphysics, Peter Harris; Acknowledgments; Introduction: James Bradley’s Path to the Trinity, Sean J. McGrath; 1. F. H. Bradley’s Metaphysics of Feeling and its Place in the History of Philosophy; 2. Whitehead, Heidegger and the Paradoxes of the New; 3. From Presence to Process: Bradley and Whitehead; 4. The Speculative Generalization of the Function: A Key to Whitehead; 5. Triads, Trinities, and Rationality; 6. The Triune Event: Event Ontology, Reason, and Love; 7. What is Existence?; 8. Beyond Hermeneutics: Peirce’s Semiology as a Trinitarian Metaphysics of Communication; 9. A Key to Collingwood’s Metaphysics of Absolute Presuppositions: The Trinitarian Creed; 10. Philosophy and Trinity; Postscript: My Friend James Bradley, Helmut Maassen.