The Domain of Finite Ontology

Abstract

Systematic philosophy has been under attack for some time. It has been identified with some of its errors, and as a result stands condemned in many quarters. It has been charged, for instance, with extending its explanation beyond the data, so that it seems to have little more value in a didactic way than any other work in which imagination might parade before fact. We are children of an empirical age to whom all such wild extrapolations seem monstrous. But there has been a clear misunderstanding. We should make every effort to deny that we wish to build a system according to which the actual world as it exists to our senses, with all its color and conflicts and fragmentariness, would be impossible. There are philosophers great in their own right who have invented schemes capable of incorporating the largest number of formerly irreconcilable propositions, and that is why to some critics Spinoza and Hegel seem in the systematic sense the most important philosophers since Aristotle.