Introduction to Special Issue: Staying with Speculation: Natures, Futures, Politics

There are five intertwining moments, somewhere between the years of 1867 and 2021, that led to the creation of this special issue.Each of these moments is woven into the philosophical and creative histories of speculation in a specifically generative way.Beneath this weaving and intertwining, however, it's all Kant's fault.It is in the Critique of Pure Reason (2007) that Kant formulates the skeletal structure of speculative philosophy.The speculative use of our Reason, Kant says, can reveal fundamental, transcendental truths about the nature of our knowledge, how we experience the world, and what we should do as a result.Speculation is a tool for safely establishing the limits of our knowledge.Its role is strict, and yet, enlarging.A new space is opened, a small insight into the 'metaphysical fog' that plagues philosophy.We can suddenly see deeper, and more profoundly, than we previously thought.This leads to the first of these intertwined moments.Friedrich Schelling, a German philosopher, sought to pierce and move beyond Kant's strict concept of speculation.For Schelling, speculation is something even more powerful than Kant admitted.It is a special and cosmological force, one which allows us to commune with the thorough interconnectedness of all things.In his time, at the turn of the 19th century, it was speculative thought that would help unite philosophy with the sciences, and form a new period of intellectual inquiry.Schelling calls this Speculative Physics, a discipline that reveals connectedness, like a mycorrhizal network, of biology, physics,