ABSTRACT
What drives or leads people, particularly young people, to philosophy is, as shall see, varied. However, one particularly persistent thing is their trying to see life as a whole. They want to see how things hang together and whether they hang together coherently. Things in their personal lives or in their society or both perplex them, indeed in some instances painfully worry them. Systematic metaphysics or speculative philosophy, an enterprise that until rather recently has been thought to be at the very heart of philosophy, and without which philosophy would lose its deepest rationale, is an extension of, and a systematically articulated statement of, the attempt to achieve the most extensive seeing of how things hang together. Speculative philosophy or metaphysics is, as Alfred North Whitehead has put it, "the endeavour to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every item of experience can be interpreted.
