Whitehead on speculative philosophy

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"Speculative Philosophy is the endeavour to form a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted." -- Process and Reality, p. 5

Faced with this standard, materialism is obviously a complete failure. When faced with their total inability to integrate conscious experience into their metaphysics, materialists either simply punt and say, "One day we'll get to that," or resort to the nonsensical move of declaring consciousness some sort of illusion.

But the reality of this empirical failure will not move most materialists: materialism is a religious faith, and will be held by them come what may.

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