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On Speculative Philosophy & the Idea of Canada
Revisiting the Work of Leslie Armour
Tags: Leslie Armour, Canadian Philosophy, Speculative Philosophy, George Grant, Charles Taylor, Sean McGrath, Harold Innis, John Ralston Saul, Integral Humanism, Jacques Maritain, Fernand Dumont, Charles de Koninck, Philosophy of Community, Canadian Sovereignty, Post-Metaphysical Philosophy, German Idealism, Contemplative Tradition, Merlin Donald, John Vervaeke, Jordan Peterson, Integral Facticity, Enactive Fallibilism, IACT, Metapattern Institute, Elizabeth Trott, William Sweet, James Bradley, Sean Kelly, Francis X. Charet, Harold Coward, Concordia University, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Elinor Ostrom
I do not do philosophy from nowhere. I am a French Canadian from Québec, formed in the Catholic intellectual tradition through Concordia, living in Montréal, writing in English about questions that have been asked in both of Canada’s languages for over a century. This is what I mean by facticity — the irreducible conditions within which all thinking actually takes place. The idea of Canada is not a topic I chose. It is part of my cultural and social facticity. It is the ground I think from, whether I acknowledge it or not.
Ever since I first read George Grant’s Lament for a Nation, the question of Canada’s philosophical identity has been at the centre of my thinking. Grant convinced me that Canadian sovereignty is a philosophical question before it is a political one — that a country which cannot articulate what it stands for will be absorbed by whatever power stands next to it. That conviction has shaped everything I have written since. But Grant’s genius was diagnostic, not constructive. He saw what Canada was losing with extraordinary clarity — but his was a lament, and a lament looks backward. The question of what Canada actually has, and what can be built with it, required a different kind of thinker.
The tradition that could answer Grant’s question has been there all along — but it has been filed under “Canadian idealism” and left safely buried as a nineteenth-century relic. Leslie Armour spent his career transforming it into something far more ambitious: a speculative philosophy that works across the divide between Anglophone idealism and Francophone Catholic thought, that insists on questions of value, meaning, and community, and that maintains the intellectual humility that modern philosophy rightly demands. Where Habermas argued that serious philosophy must abandon speculative depth and restrict itself to the formal conditions of rational communication, the tradition Armour built holds both — depth and modesty, conviction and fallibilism. It does not surrender the questions that matter most. It asks them differently.
In my last essay, I engaged Sean McGrath’s The Lost Road and argued for a new integral humanism — drawing on Haidt’s moral psychology, Hayes’s Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, and Wilber’s integral theory — capable of holding contemplative depth and post-metaphysical rigor together without collapsing them into a single system. After I published that essay, McGrath and I corresponded briefly. In the course of that exchange, he mentioned something that stopped me: Leslie Armour had been his first teacher of metaphysics, at the University of Ottawa.
That detail crystallized something I had been working toward for years but had not yet written. I had been pressing the question of Canadian philosophical identity on my podcast guests since I first encountered Grant at Concordia — what it meant for their work, what it meant for the traditions they were carrying forward. Grant diagnosed the loss. Armour documented what we actually have. McGrath is extending it into new philosophical territory. The essay connecting them was the one I had not yet written.
This essay is a companion to the one that preceded it. Where that essay engaged McGrath’s work and asked what a new integral humanism might look like, this one turns to the tradition itself — and argues that it is adequate to the present emergency, if we have the flexibility and determination to use it.
Leslie Armour: A Philosophical Life
Leslie Armour (1931–2014) was born in New Westminster, British Columbia. He completed his BA at the University of British Columbia in 1952 and his PhD at the University of London in 1956. He taught philosophy first in the United States — at universities in Montana, California, and Ohio — then at the University of Waterloo, before joining the University of Ottawa in 1977, where he remained until his retirement as professor emeritus. He continued as Research Professor of Philosophy at the Dominican University College in Ottawa and Adjunct Professor of Philosophical Theology at St. Paul University until his death. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1998.
His output was extraordinary. A prolific writer, he authored nine books — three with co-authors — along with numerous chapters and articles in scholarly journals spanning philosophy, economics, religious studies, and French and German philosophy. He edited the International Journal of Social Economics from 2004 to 2010. Armour truly represented the eclecticism of Canadian culture — a philosopher equally at home in German metaphysics, French Thomism, British idealism, and the practical questions of how a country holds itself together.
His work fell into three interconnected streams.
Systematic philosophy. His first three books — The Rational and the Real (1962), The Concept of Truth (1969), and Logic and Reality (1972) — continued the idealist tradition, working through the relationship between rational principles and empirical experience. His later work extended this into metaphysics and the philosophy of religion: Being and Idea: Developments of Some Themes in Spinoza and Hegel (1992) and Infini-Rien: Pascal’s Wager and the Human Paradox (1993). His most recent book, Inference and Persuasion: An Introduction to Logic and Critical Reasoning (2005), co-authored with Richard Feist, reflected his lifelong conviction that nothing is certain — that philosophy offers suggestions rather than solutions, and that this is a strength, not a weakness.
Canadian philosophy. Here Armour was a genuine pioneer. Together with Elizabeth Trott, he produced The Faces of Reason: An Essay on Philosophy and Culture in English Canada, 1850–1950 (1981) — the first systematic history of philosophical thought in English Canada. Armour and Trott traced how thinkers like John Watson at Queen’s, George Paxton Young, George John Blewett, and John Clark Murray developed a philosophical tradition shaped by the particular demands of building community across vast geography, between two linguistic worlds, under the influence of both British idealism and French Catholic thought. They demonstrated that this was not a provincial branch of European philosophy but a genuine philosophical contribution — one in which the problem of unity-in-plurality was not merely theoretical but existential, forced upon Canadian thinkers by the conditions of the country itself.
The Idea of Canada. In The Idea of Canada and the Crisis of Community (1981), published the same year as The Faces of Reason, Armour made the argument explicit. Community comes before individuality. “I would not know who I was if I were alone in the universe.” Drawing on both the Scottish Hegelian John Watson and the French Catholic intellectual tradition, Armour described Canadian society as an organic “community of communities” — diverse regional, cultural, and philosophical traditions forming interdependent alliances for mutual preservation. This was what he called “philosophic federalism”: a pluralistic framework that accommodates group rights and shared public enterprises without collapsing into state collectivism or atomistic individualism. The Canadian Encyclopedia captures his spirit well: “The idea of Canada has sparked his lifelong, often tumultuous pursuit of just causes.”
What holds these three streams together is a single conviction: philosophy, properly pursued, must be speculative. It must go deeper than what the natural sciences or the market can measure. It must insist on the reality of value, meaning, community, and the inner life — and it must do so systematically rather than surrendering to the fragmentation of knowledge that Armour identified as one of the deepest problems of the modern university. Armour was not doing philosophy as an academic exercise. He wanted to know what holds a community together, and he believed the answer was philosophical.
A Canon Ready to Be Transformed
Canada has philosophical resources adequate to the present emergency. The argument of this essay is not that we need to recover something lost, but that we need to transform what we already have — to take the speculative tradition that runs through the country’s intellectual history and make it adequate to conditions its founders could not have anticipated. This requires what I have been calling, through the Metapattern Institute’s work on Integral Awareness and Commitment Training, psychological flexibility: the capacity to hold multiple truths simultaneously, to accept what is without being paralyzed by it, and to act from values even when the situation is threatening. Canada needs this flexibility now — not as a therapeutic concept applied to individuals, but as a philosophical orientation applied to an entire political community facing existential threat.
The tradition is deep. It stretches back to the founding generation of the country’s universities — and, as John Ralston Saul has argued with force and persistence, it stretches back much further than that, into the Indigenous philosophical practices that shaped Canadian governance, diplomacy, and community long before Confederation. But depth alone is not enough. The tradition also carries failures that must be acknowledged — what, in the integral framework, we would call cleaning up: facing honestly the mistakes that were made, the warnings that were ignored, the parts of the tradition that were suppressed or excluded. Grant warned us about continental economic integration, and we signed the Free Trade Agreement anyway. Armour argued that Canadians needed to know their own philosophical traditions, and most Canadian universities continued to ignore them. The Indigenous philosophical contributions that Saul identified as foundational to Canadian civilization were systematically suppressed for over a century. Cleaning up means facing all of this without flinching — and then asking what a transformed tradition, one that has done this work, can offer.
The canon begins where you might expect. John Watson arrived at Queen’s University in 1872 and dominated English Canadian philosophy until his death in 1939 — nearly seven decades. His work on the relationship between freedom and community shaped the theology that became the backbone of the United Church of Canada, the country’s largest Protestant denomination. Several of the United Church’s founders — Samuel Dyde, George Kilpatrick, Watson himself — were idealist philosophers who believed that religious life and philosophical life were not separate enterprises but different expressions of the same commitment to community. George Paxton Young’s work on freedom and moral psychology in the 1860s and 1870s anticipated developments in European philosophy by decades. John Clark Murray, whose The Industrial Kingdom of God was edited and annotated by Armour and Trott, argued for an economics grounded in moral philosophy rather than utilitarian calculation — an argument that sounds radical today but was, for the Canadian idealists, simply what following the logic of community required.
The next generation deepened the tradition and began building the institutions to sustain it. James Doull at Dalhousie developed a Hegelian philosophy of history and freedom. Harold Innis at Toronto is better known as a communication theorist and political economist, but his significance for the Canadian philosophical tradition goes beyond any disciplinary label. Innis was an institutional builder of the first order: he was instrumental in founding the Canadian Social Science Research Council in 1940 and the Humanities Research Council of Canada in 1944 — the infrastructure that would fund an entire generation of Canadian research. He understood, with a clarity that now looks prophetic, that a country’s intellectual traditions do not sustain themselves. They require material conditions — institutions, funding, publishing networks, the protected time for reflection that only a society committed to its own intellectual life can provide.
But Innis was also a diagnostic thinker. His Empire and Communications (1950) and The Bias of Communication (1951) argued that every medium of communication carries a built-in bias toward either time or space — toward either the preservation of tradition (oral cultures, manuscript cultures) or the expansion of territory (print, broadcast, empire). His Minerva’s Owl (1947) — the title taken from Hegel’s image of the owl of Minerva spreading its wings only at dusk — argued with characteristic severity that the richest flowering of a culture often occurs just before its decline. The forces of commercialism, technological media, and continental integration he was already observing in the 1940s posed the deepest threat to the kind of sustained, reflective thinking that Canada most needed. Innis built the house. He also diagnosed, in advance, the forces that would try to tear it down.
George Grant took this diagnosis further. His Lament for a Nation (1965) remains the most famous piece of Canadian political philosophy ever written. Grant argued that the moral principle at the heart of the Canadian community was “order” — in contrast to the American principle of “liberty” — and that economic integration with the United States would inevitably dissolve Canadian sovereignty by replacing the country’s east-west national infrastructure with north-south continental dependencies. The defeat of Diefenbaker’s government — which had resisted American pressure to accept nuclear warheads on Canadian soil — was, for Grant, the moment when the impossibility of Canada as an independent nation became visible. Canada’s business and political elites had chosen continental integration over national sovereignty, and once that choice was made, the rest would follow. Grant’s Technology and Empire (1969) extended the analysis: the technological society, in its American form, would homogenize everything it touched, reducing all particular traditions — including Canada’s — to raw material for the universal market. Grant was right about the mechanism. The question he could not answer — and knew he could not answer — was what to do about it. His was a lament, not a program.
I read Grant and John Ralston Saul simultaneously, and the effect was decisive. Where Grant diagnosed the disease and mourned what was being lost, Saul diagnosed the same disease and fought back. His philosophical trilogy — Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West (1992), The Doubter’s Companion (1994), and The Unconscious Civilization (1995) — attacked the managerial capture of reason that had hollowed out democratic citizenship across the West. Grant saw technological homogenization; Saul saw rational managerialism — the cult of expertise and process-driven governance that excludes ordinary citizens from the decisions that shape their lives. Both were diagnosing the same empire from different angles: Grant from the perspective of what was lost, Saul from the perspective of what had gone wrong with the rational tools that were supposed to serve us.
But Saul did something Grant could not. He built. He co-founded the Institute for Canadian Citizenship. He established the LaFontaine-Baldwin Lectures to gather Canadians for sustained reflection on democracy and the public good. As International President of PEN International, he championed freedom of expression and the protection of endangered languages — including, with particular force, Indigenous languages. Where Grant’s conservatism was a holding action, Saul’s was a constructive project: not merely lamenting the decline but building the institutional infrastructure that a democratic civilization requires.
And then, in A Fair Country: Telling Truths about Canada (2008), Saul enlarged the entire conversation. He argued that Canada is fundamentally a Métis civilization — that Canadian culture has been profoundly shaped by Indigenous ideas: an original approach to egalitarianism, a taste for social complexity, a preference for negotiation over violence, and a constant balancing of individual and group that is not European in origin but Indigenous. Canada, Saul argued, is built on a “triangular reality” of three founding nations — First Peoples, Francophones, and Anglophones — and the denial of this Indigenous philosophical foundation is at the heart of the country’s recurring identity crises. The Comeback (2014) extended the argument, tracking the remarkable resurgence of Indigenous peoples in Canada and calling on non-Indigenous Canadians to recognize that rebuilding right relationships with Indigenous nations is not a side issue but the central challenge of Canadian public life.
Saul’s intervention matters for this essay because it transforms Armour’s “community of communities” from a European-descended philosophical framework into something deeper and more adequate. If Armour demonstrated that Canada has a speculative philosophical tradition, Saul demonstrated that this tradition — properly understood — does not begin with Watson in 1872 or with the British idealists or the French Catholic thinkers. It begins with the Indigenous philosophical practices that made the country possible in the first place. The egalitarianism, the pluralism, the commitment to negotiation and balance that the European-descended tradition articulated philosophically were already operating in the Indigenous communities that shaped Canadian governance and diplomacy for centuries before Confederation. To transform the canon — rather than merely to recover it — means reckoning with this. It means acknowledging that the tradition is deeper than any single lineage, and that the philosophical resources Canada needs include traditions that the academic establishment spent a century trying to suppress.
This is what cleaning up looks like at the civilizational level. It is not guilt. It is not paralysis. It is what Steven Hayes — whose Acceptance and Commitment Therapy provides the functional framework for the IACT model the Metapattern Institute is developing — calls acceptance: the willingness to face what is, without avoidance or distortion, so that committed action becomes possible. Canada suppressed Indigenous knowledge for over a century. That is a fact. Canada ignored its own philosophical traditions for decades. That is also a fact. The cleaning up is not the end of the story. It is the precondition for transformation.
Charles Taylor — the one Canadian philosopher most people actually know — provided another essential piece. His work on identity, recognition, and the sources of the modern self gave philosophical depth to the intuition that pluralistic communities cannot survive on procedural neutrality alone. They need what Taylor calls “strong evaluations” — shared moral frameworks that tell communities not just how to organize their disagreements but what they are disagreeing about. Taylor’s Sources of the Self (1989) traced how the modern understanding of what it means to be a person — with an inner life, with rights, with dignity — emerged not from secular reason alone but from a complex interplay of Christian theology, Enlightenment philosophy, and Romantic expressivism. His A Secular Age (2007) extended this analysis, arguing that secularization is not the simple subtraction of religion from public life but the creation of new conditions in which belief and unbelief are both live options — and that navigating these conditions requires philosophical resources that purely secular frameworks cannot provide. Taylor has been read internationally as a philosopher of multiculturalism and secularism. He should also be read as a major voice in the Canadian speculative tradition — a tradition he has never disowned but has rarely been credited with extending.
And then there is the Francophone side, which most Anglophone Canadians have never been taught to engage with philosophically. The Catholic intellectual tradition in Québec produced thinkers of genuine depth who were working on the same problems the Anglophone idealists were working on — what holds a community together, what persons owe each other, what it means to pursue the common good across deep differences. Charles de Koninck at Laval wrote on the common good with a philosophical seriousness that rivals anything in the Anglophone tradition — his debate with Jacques Maritain on the primacy of the common good over the individual good remains one of the most important exchanges in twentieth-century Catholic social thought. Fernand Dumont — sociologist, philosopher, theologian, and poet — developed a theory of culture as “memory and distance,” arguing that without culture, persons would be trapped in the monotony of their present actions, unable to create a past or a future. Gregory Baum at McGill interpreted Dumont’s work as an innovative reinterpretation of Catholicism that was faithful to the Gospel and relevant to the questions Québécois were actually asking themselves. Jacques Grand’Maison spent decades working on the lived theology of Québec communities, insisting that the spiritual and the social were not separate domains. These were not merely ecclesiastical figures. They were asking fundamental philosophical questions from within a tradition that the secular academy had decided was embarrassing — and their questions have not been answered by ignoring them.
Armour himself worked across this divide. He published in Maritain Studies, writing on the relationship between Maritain, the scholastic tradition, and the Canadian philosophical context. He held positions at the Dominican University College and St. Paul University — institutions where philosophy and theology were in sustained dialogue. He understood, perhaps better than anyone, that the two solitudes of Canadian philosophy were asking the same fundamental question from different vocabularies. The tragedy is not that the tradition is absent. It is that Canadians have not yet done the work — the growing up, the cleaning up — required to transform it into the resource this moment demands.
How the Tradition Moves
I came to Armour’s work through personal relationships rather than institutional transmission — which is itself a datum about the state of Canadian philosophical infrastructure. The story of how I found it is also the story of why the question of knowledge mobilization is as urgent as the philosophical questions themselves.
I am a French Canadian from Québec. I studied at Concordia University under Marc Lalonde — who was a student of Charles Davis, the founding chair of Concordia’s Department of Religious Studies and one of the most important Catholic intellectuals of the twentieth century. Davis had left the Catholic priesthood after a public break with the Vatican, but he never left the intellectual tradition. He brought the Frankfurt School — Habermas, critical theory, the relationship between religion and emancipation — into dialogue with Catholic thought. Lalonde carried this forward. When I mentioned “integral theory” in Lalonde’s classroom, he did not think of Ken Wilber. He thought of Jacques Maritain’s Integral Humanism — the 1936 work that argued for a political and social order centred on the full dignity of the human person, against both bourgeois individualism and totalitarian collectivism. That collision of two different meanings of “integral” turned out to be the origin of everything I have been building since. Maritain’s integral humanism was there before Wilber’s integral theory, and the Canadian Catholic intellectual tradition knew it even if the American integral community did not.
But I did not find the speculative philosophical tradition — Armour, Trott, the deeper Canadian canon — through Concordia’s curriculum. I found it through the podcast I began producing in 2022, where one of my persistent angles was pressing guests on their Canadian identity and formation — a question that had been at the forefront of my thinking since Grant and Saul.
Sean Kelly — a Franco-Irish Catholic from the Ottawa-Gatineau area — came on my Integral Facticity podcast to discuss transpersonal theory. Kelly had done his MA and PhD at the University of Ottawa and Carleton University, under the Hegel scholars Theodore Geraets and H.S. Harris. His external committee member was John Dourley at Carleton, who planted the Hegel-Jung seed that became Kelly’s dissertation. Kelly ran the Jung Society of Ottawa, spent years as an adjunct between the University of Windsor and Ottawa, and eventually landed at the California Institute of Integral Studies when Richard Tarnas invited him to teach. His mother was French Canadian. He went to French school in Ottawa. His brother and sister still live in Gatineau.
Two things about Kelly struck me immediately. First, he co-edited Ken Wilber in Dialogue — the very book that had originally drawn me toward religious studies at Concordia — and he had coined the term “integral ecologies” (plural) precisely to differentiate from the Wilberian singular. He was making the same structural move I was making: grounding “integral” in European-Canadian intellectual traditions rather than in the American integral community that had grown up around Wilber. The difference was that Kelly had done it decades earlier, from within the Ottawa institutional ground where Armour himself had spent the major portion of his career. Second, Kelly’s entire formation — the Hegel scholars at Ottawa, the Jung connection through Dourley, the Catholic intellectual tradition transmitted through French-Canadian schooling — represented exactly the kind of institutional memory that Canadians are not taught to recognize as a philosophical lineage. It was right there, in Ottawa, running through the same corridors where Armour had taught. I was asking the right questions — but I had not yet connected the answers to Armour’s name.
Kelly introduced me to Francis X. Charet — a McGill-trained scholar of Jung who had done his doctorate at Ottawa at the same time as Kelly, working on the influence of spiritualism on Jung. Charet had applied for academic positions in Canada, couldn’t find one, and ended up building the Consciousness Studies concentration at Goddard College in Vermont. He is now semi-retired in Montréal — in my backyard. Charet’s story is instructive. Here was a serious scholar of religion and consciousness — McGill doctorate, decades of teaching, published internationally — who could not find a permanent academic position in Canada. The country that produced the intellectual tradition he worked within could not sustain his career. He had to leave, and when he came back, it was not to an institution but to retirement.
It was Charet who handed me the thread that unravelled everything. He introduced me to Harold Coward’s Fifty Years of Religious Studies in Canada and to Robert C. Hughes’s From Seminary to University: An Institutional History of the Study of Religion in Canada. Coward had studied under George Grant at McMaster. His book documented the institutional conditions — the departments, the funding structures, the hiring patterns — that had shaped what Canadians could and could not study about their own religious and philosophical traditions. Hughes’s work traced how the institutional study of religion in Canada had evolved from its seminary origins — how the questions that had once been asked within confessional frameworks had been translated, not always successfully, into the secular university.
Grant to Coward to Charet to me. Four generations of Canadian scholars passing institutional memory forward through personal relationships, because the institutional channels had failed to carry it. The tradition was not dead. It was being transmitted person to person, in conversation, outside the official structures.
This pattern is not accidental, and it is not merely a story about academic precarity. It tells us something fundamental about how knowledge moves — and about what happens when institutional transmission fails. Merlin Donald, at Queen’s University, spent his career mapping the cognitive architecture of cultural transmission. His Origins of the Modern Mind (1991) identifies the stages through which human cultures develop and sustain shared knowledge: from episodic memory through mimetic and mythic culture to the theoretic culture that depends on external symbolic storage — writing, libraries, institutions, archives. Donald’s argument is that human cognition is fundamentally distributed: we do not think alone, and the external systems that store and transmit knowledge are not supplements to thinking but constitutive of it. When those external systems fail — when the institutions stop transmitting the tradition — the knowledge does not simply persist in individual minds. It degrades, fragments, and eventually disappears. Unless someone rebuilds the transmission infrastructure.
Harold Innis made the same argument from a different direction. He spent his career arguing that every medium of communication carries a built-in bias — toward either the preservation of tradition across time or the expansion of control across space. The face-to-face transmission of knowledge through personal relationships was, for Innis, the form of communication most resistant to the distortions of imperial power, precisely because it depended on dialogue rather than broadcast. My podcast conversations with Kelly, Charet, and others were operating in this register — not as a revival of some ancient oral practice, but as a contemporary form of knowledge mobilization that happened to share the structural features Innis had identified. The tradition was being passed forward through dialogue because the institutions designed to carry it had stopped doing their job.
The irony — and it is worth naming — is that two of the most globally visible public intellectuals currently working on questions of meaning, cognition, and the crisis of the modern self are Canadian, and neither is typically discussed in relation to the Canadian philosophical tradition this essay has been mapping. Jordan Peterson’s work on moral seriousness and the structures of meaning, whatever one thinks of his political interventions, draws enormous audiences precisely because it addresses questions the secular academy abandoned: what do persons owe to their communities, what does it mean to live a meaningful life, what happens when shared moral frameworks collapse. John Vervaeke’s “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis” — a lecture series that has reached millions — maps the cognitive science of wisdom traditions and argues that the modern West is suffering from a crisis of meaning that cannot be solved by more information but only by the recovery of participatory knowing. Both are responding to the same hunger. Both are Canadian. And the philosophical tradition that has been asking these questions with the most depth and the longest institutional memory — the tradition of Watson, Grant, Saul, Taylor, Armour — is the one neither of them has been taught to claim.
This is not a criticism of Peterson or Vervaeke. It is a diagnosis of a transmission failure. The Canadian speculative tradition has the resources to ground and deepen exactly the questions they are raising — community, meaning, moral seriousness, the relationship between cognition and culture. But the institutional infrastructure that should have connected them to that tradition was not functioning. The tradition moved through personal relationships, through corridors and conversations and podcasts, because the official channels had broken down. The question is not whether the tradition survives — it does. The question is whether we can build the knowledge mobilization infrastructure adequate to what it carries.
More Than Canadian Idealism
But what is the name? When scholars discuss this tradition at all, they tend to call it “Canadian idealism.” Robert Meynell, in his 2005 University of Ottawa thesis Canadian Idealism: Forgotten, Not Lost — later published by McGill-Queen’s University Press as Canadian Idealism and the Philosophy of Freedom — traced three central commitments of the tradition: that knowledge is socially cultivated through history rather than simply an individual achievement; that understanding current beliefs requires understanding the historical dialogue that produced them; and that freedom is achieved through commitment to community rather than in opposition to it. Meynell’s title captures the situation precisely. The tradition is forgotten — it does not appear in the curricula of most Canadian philosophy departments, it is not taught to undergraduates, it is not referenced in the public debates about Canadian identity that erupt every few years — but it is not lost. The books are in print. The scholars who study them are still active. The ideas have not been refuted. They have simply been ignored, which is a very different thing.
But “Canadian idealism” as a label invites dismissals. It sounds like a nineteenth-century relic, superseded by analytic philosophy, pragmatism, or continental phenomenology. William Sweet — the foremost living scholar of Armour’s work and editor of the memorial volume Idealism, Metaphysics, and Community (2001), as well as a volume of the Collected Works of Jacques Maritain — makes a decisive move. He argues that we should understand Armour and his predecessors not as “idealists” but as practitioners of speculative philosophy: philosophy that goes “deeper into the heart of facts as they are.”
This reframing matters because it opens up the tradition rather than narrowing it. Speculative philosophy is a broader and more durable category than idealism. It includes the idealist lineage but is not confined to it. It runs from Plato through the medieval syntheses of Aquinas and the Islamic philosophers, through the British idealists and the German Idealism of Hegel and Schelling, through the process philosophy of Whitehead, and into contemporary work that refuses the artificial boundaries between analytic and continental, between philosophy and theology, between systematic thinking and embodied experience. When we call the Canadian tradition “speculative philosophy” rather than “Canadian idealism,” we are not making a cosmetic change. We are placing it in a much larger conversation — one that is alive and growing, not confined to a historical period.
And this is where McGrath enters the picture again. He is not typically discussed alongside Grant and Taylor as a “Canadian philosopher.” He is known internationally for his work on Schelling, Heidegger, and the philosophy of religion. His The Dark Ground of Spirit: Schelling and the Unconscious (2012) is a landmark recovery of German Idealism as a living philosophical resource. But as I argued in my previous essay, The Lost Road reveals that McGrath’s Schelling scholarship — brilliant, rigorous, indispensable — functioned in part as the scholarly apparatus for a deeper commitment: the recovery of the Western Christian contemplative tradition as a mode of philosophical knowing that the contemporary academy does not welcome. His formation was Canadian. Armour was his first teacher of metaphysics. He teaches at Memorial University in Newfoundland, where his colleague James Bradley spent decades doing speculative philosophy — engaging F.H. Bradley, Whitehead, Peirce, Collingwood, and Trinitarian metaphysics — before his death in 2012. McGrath edited Bradley’s posthumous Collected Essays in Speculative Philosophy for Edinburgh University Press. Bradley contributed to Sweet’s memorial volume on Armour. The networks overlap because the philosophical concerns overlap. The German Idealism revival, the Canadian speculative tradition, and the recovery of the contemplative tradition are not separate conversations. They are the same conversation, conducted from different starting points, converging on the same questions about the relationship between reason, nature, freedom, and the divine.
Others are carrying the tradition forward. Sweet at St. Francis Xavier continues to publish on the British idealist and Canadian speculative traditions. Trott carried the tradition for decades at what is now Toronto Metropolitan University. Eric Wilkinson at UBC is editing a forthcoming special issue of Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review on “Envisioning Canada.” The conversation has never stopped. What it has lacked is a name adequate to what it is doing and a framework capable of bringing its various streams — Anglophone idealism, Francophone Catholic thought, Indigenous philosophical traditions, German Idealism revival, philosophy of religion, political philosophy — into sustained dialogue.
This is not area studies. This is not Canadian Studies as a substitute for rigorous thought. It is not nationalist nostalgia dressed up in academic language. This is philosophy, addressed to universal questions — What is the nature of community? What do persons owe each other? Can philosophy after the Enlightenment still address questions of ultimate concern? — from a particular place, which is the only honest way philosophy has ever been done. Plato wrote from Athens. Hegel wrote from Berlin. Armour wrote from Ottawa. The particularity of the location does not limit the universality of the questions. It grounds them in the conditions from which they actually arise — which is what speculative philosophy has always meant by going “deeper into the heart of facts as they are.”
The Post-Metaphysical Challenge — and Canada’s Answer
In my previous essay, I described the post-metaphysical challenge in terms of the impasse between Habermas and the depth tradition McGrath is recovering. Habermas argued, influentially, that philosophy after the Enlightenment must be “post-metaphysical” — must abandon the speculative ambitions of traditional metaphysics (claims about the ultimate nature of reality, God, the soul) and restrict itself to the formal conditions of rational communication. No more grand systems. No more claims about what is ultimately real. Philosophy becomes procedural: it tells us how to argue fairly, not what is ultimately true.
I take this critique seriously. It is right that philosophy cannot return to pre-critical metaphysics — cannot pretend that Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the critiques of ideology never happened. Any serious contemporary philosophy must be fallibilist. It must acknowledge the historical and social conditions of its own thinking. It must resist the temptation to claim absolute knowledge.
But the Habermasian solution — restricting philosophy to the formal conditions of communication — strips out the substantive content that makes communication worth having in the first place. It tells us how to talk to each other but cannot say what is worth talking about. It provides procedures for reaching agreement but cannot articulate why community matters, what persons are, or whether reality has a depth that exceeds what empirical science can measure. A philosophy that can describe its procedures but not its substance is a philosophy that has already conceded the most important questions to whoever is willing to answer them — and in the current moment, the people willing to answer them are not, for the most part, the people we want answering them.
In the previous essay, I used Jonathan Haidt’s moral psychology to make this concrete. Haidt’s research demonstrates that human moral reasoning operates through at least six distinct foundations — Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, Sanctity, and Liberty — and that progressive and liberal thinkers tend to activate only two or three of these foundations (Care, Fairness, and sometimes Liberty), while conservative and religious thinkers activate all six. The cultural consequence is that the left has been systematically ceding the moral foundations of Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity to the right — and with them, the questions of community, tradition, and the sacred that most people, across all political orientations, experience as central to a meaningful life. When the left abandons these moral foundations, it does not make them disappear. It hands them to whoever will pick them up. The result is not the triumph of secular rationality but the capture of deep moral intuitions by movements that lack the philosophical resources to handle them responsibly.
I also drew on Steven Hayes’s Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and Wilber’s integral theory to argue that what is needed is not a choice between speculative depth and post-metaphysical critique, but a framework that can hold both — that can insist on questions of value, meaning, and the inner life while maintaining the fallibilist humility that the post-metaphysical critique rightly demands. Hayes’s hexaflex — six interrelated processes of psychological flexibility: defusion, acceptance, present-moment awareness, self-as-context, values, and committed action — provides the functional mechanism. Wilber’s distinction between pre-rational and trans-rational (the “Pre/Trans Fallacy”) provides the diagnostic: the error of confusing a genuine return to depth with a regression to pre-critical thinking.
What I want to argue now is that the Canadian speculative tradition, as Armour built it, provides the philosophical ground on which these functional and diagnostic tools can stand. McGrath’s project gives us the depth — the recovery of the Western contemplative tradition as a living resource for philosophical knowing, grounded in his Schelling scholarship but reaching far beyond it into the Christian mystical tradition from Eckhart through Böhme to the Carmelite contemplatives. Hayes gives us the practice — psychological flexibility as a method for engaging difficulty without being destroyed by it. Saul gives us the institutional imagination — the demonstration that diagnosis without construction is insufficient, and that a tradition must be actively built into the institutions of public life if it is to survive. But Armour gives us something none of them provides alone: a philosophical tradition that has always held that community requires more than procedures, that pluralism is a resource rather than a problem, and that speculative depth and intellectual humility are not contradictions.
Armour worked across the divide between idealism and Thomism, between Anglophone and Francophone traditions, between philosophy and theology. He demonstrated, by the example of his own career, that one can insist on the reality of value and meaning without claiming certainty about it. The tradition he and Trott documented — from Watson and the nineteenth-century idealists through the Francophone Catholic thinkers — and the broader lineage that extends through Grant, Saul, and Taylor into the present, has always held that community requires a shared understanding of what persons are, what they owe each other, and why the enterprise of living together is worth the effort. This is not a pre-critical claim. It is a recognition that procedural rationality alone cannot generate the solidarity it presupposes.
What I have been calling Integral Facticity, and what the Metapattern Institute is developing as Integral Awareness and Commitment Training, is an attempt to bring these resources together into a working framework. The name “integral” here draws on Maritain’s integral humanism — but it does not simply recover Maritain’s 1936 formulation. It updates it for post-metaphysical conditions. Maritain wrote before the full force of the post-metaphysical critique, before the collapse of Christendom as a political project, before the cognitive revolution, before the meaning crisis that Vervaeke and others have diagnosed. What Maritain’s integral humanism becomes when it passes through these developments — when it absorbs the post-metaphysical critique without surrendering substantive moral depth, when it incorporates the cognitive science of meaning and the functional psychology of ACT, when it grounds itself in the Canadian speculative tradition’s insistence on pluralism and community — is something genuinely new. It is not Maritain’s integral humanism. It is what integral humanism looks like after Maritain, after Grant, after Saul, after Taylor, after the speculative tradition has been brought into contact with the resources it needs to address the present emergency.
“Facticity” comes from the existential tradition — Heidegger, but also the pragmatists — and names the irreducible conditions within which all thinking and living actually take place: biological, psychological, historical, social. We wake up, grow up, clean up, and show up within facticity, not in escape from it.
The framework goes through and beyond Ken Wilber’s integral theory, in dialogue with his work while drawing on additional philosophical lineages most integral practitioners do not engage: the integral humanism of Maritain and Fred Dallmayr, the Canadian speculative tradition of Armour, Sweet, and Trott, the substantive moral pluralism of Charles Taylor, the continental philosophy and German Idealism revival that McGrath, Bradley, and their networks represent. It grounds itself in what I call Enactive Fallibilism — the recognition, drawing on C.S. Peirce’s pragmatic fallibilism and Evan Thompson’s enactivism, that our knowing is always embodied, situated, and tested against the world. We do not have a view from nowhere. But neither are we trapped in mere subjectivity. We test our frameworks against experience, and when they produce suffering — when they fail the people they are supposed to serve — we treat them as falsified and commit to revision. This is not relativism. It is empiricism about values, conducted from within lived experience rather than from above it.
Meynell’s three pillars of Canadian idealism map directly onto this framework, which is why I believe IACT is not an import but an extension of the tradition Armour was building. Knowledge as socially cultivated through history — this is what Enactive Fallibilism addresses: we do not think alone, and our thinking is always shaped by the traditions and communities that formed us. The philosophy of history — this is what the communicative and prosocial dimensions of IACT are designed to navigate, drawing on Elinor Ostrom’s Core Design Principles for group cooperation and on Steven Hayes’s work on psychological flexibility. Freedom through commitment to community rather than in opposition to it — this is the ethical core of the entire project. ACT’s hexaflex operates not as individual optimization but as a relational practice, embedded in communities and oriented toward shared values. The moral psychology that orients the framework comes from Grant and Taylor — from Grant’s insistence that the Canadian moral principle is order rather than liberty, and from Taylor’s argument that communities require strong evaluations, shared moral frameworks that go deeper than procedural neutrality. The Canadian speculative tradition and the framework being built to extend it are not in tension. They are the same project, separated by time and now being reassembled.
The Present Emergency
George Grant wrote his Lament for a Nation in 1965. It was a diagnosis, and it was largely right. Economic integration with the United States would erode Canadian sovereignty — not through military force but through the steady replacement of east-west national infrastructure with north-south continental dependency.
Grant’s analysis has been confirmed at every stage. The Free Trade Agreement of 1988 and its successor NAFTA did exactly what Grant predicted: they reoriented the Canadian economy along north-south lines, making Canadian industries dependent on American markets and American capital. The denationalization of Canada’s energy sector — the gradual dismantling of the National Energy Program and the opening of Canadian oil and gas to foreign ownership — completed the economic integration that Grant had warned would dissolve the material basis of Canadian sovereignty. Saul, too, saw this clearly: in The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World (2005), he argued that the globalist ideology was already breaking down, and that if we did not act quickly we would be caught in a crisis and limited to desperate reactions. He was right. You cannot have an independent country if you do not control your own resources. Grant knew this. Saul knew this. The politicians who signed those agreements either did not understand what they were doing or understood it perfectly and decided that continental integration was worth more than national sovereignty. Either way, the result is the same: a country whose economic structure now runs north-south while its political and cultural identity requires east-west solidarity.
But Grant’s lament was a lament, and a lament is not a program. He could diagnose the disease — the “impossibility of Canada” in the face of American technological and economic power — but he could not prescribe the cure. His conservatism was a holding action: a defence of what had been, without a constructive vision of what could be. This is where the Canadian speculative tradition, properly understood, goes beyond Grant. Grant told us what we were losing. Armour, Saul, Taylor, and the tradition they represent tell us what we already have and what can be built with it.
Grant wrote a lament. I am trying to build what comes after it — a comprehensive and integral response.
Eric Wilkinson, writing in the APA Blog in January 2025 — in a piece titled “The 49th Parallel: Canadian Philosophy and American Imperialism” — reminded us that the threat of American absorption has been a constant in Canadian history. The Fathers of Confederation watched the American Civil War unfold across the border and feared the Americans would turn their guns northward, as they had in 1812. Grant warned that the mechanisms would be economic rather than military. He was right about that. But what is happening now exceeds even Grant’s pessimism.
In February 2025, the Trump administration imposed sweeping tariffs on Canadian goods — 25 percent across the board — and Donald Trump began calling publicly for Canada to become the 51st state, referring to the Canadian prime minister as “Governor.” When asked whether he would use military force against Canada, as he had threatened against Panama and Greenland, Trump replied: “No, economic force.” The annexation rhetoric was not a joke. Trump confirmed in interviews that his suggestions were serious. Trade was weaponized as an instrument of submission. Sovereignty was treated as negotiable. Canadian officials, who had initially dismissed the rhetoric, began to interpret it as a genuine threat to the country’s existence.
Canadians responded with a force and unity that surprised even themselves. The country experienced what observers described as a rally-round-the-flag effect: boycotts of American goods spread across the country, national pride surged — the proportion of Canadians saying they were “very proud” of their country jumped ten percentage points in two months — and support for joining the United States dropped to four percent. Crowds booed the American national anthem at sporting events. Provinces that had resisted internal trade liberalization for decades began dismantling barriers between themselves. A new prime minister, elected in part on the strength of his resistance to American threats, told the American president to his face that the 51st-state rhetoric was not useful. Military experts began openly discussing the possibility of becoming a nuclear power. As one Canadian columnist wrote in the Boston Globe: “Canada did not pick this fight. But if they are going to take a punch, they will try to give one right back.”
This is not an attack on the American people — many of whom are fighting the same battles against managerial capture and democratic erosion that Saul diagnosed decades ago. It is a recognition that the current American administration has made the absorption of Canada an explicit policy objective, and that Canadians can no longer afford to treat the threat as hypothetical.
Wilkinson makes a point that should be obvious but needs to be said: nations are moral communities that embody certain values and embed those values in their laws and institutions. The ethos at the heart of the Canadian community — what A.B. McKillop called the “moral imperative” in Canadian philosophy, what Watson and the nineteenth-century idealists articulated, what Grant diagnosed, what Saul enlarged to include Indigenous foundations, and what Taylor theorized — is not the American ethos. Compare the Declaration of Independence — “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” — to the British North America Act — “peace, order, and good government.” Saul has pointed out that every single document before the BNA Act actually used the phrase “peace, welfare, and good government” — the well-being of the citizenry was the original formulation, before it was bureaucratized. These are not cosmetic differences. They are expressions of fundamentally different philosophical commitments about what communities are for. Canada’s universal healthcare system, whatever its faults, embodies a different understanding of what persons owe each other than the American model. When Trump declares that Canadians would have “much better” healthcare as the 51st state, he is not merely wrong about policy. He is philosophically illiterate about the tradition that produced the policy.
But here is the problem Grant identified and could not solve: you cannot defend a moral community simply by pointing to its policies. You must be able to articulate the philosophical commitments that generated those policies — and you must have a living tradition capable of sustaining, revising, and extending those commitments as conditions change. Healthcare policy is an expression of deeper commitments to community over atomistic individualism, to pluralism over homogeneity, to mutual obligation over unconstrained liberty. These commitments have philosophical roots. They were articulated by Watson and the nineteenth-century idealists, developed by Grant, enlarged by Saul, theorized by Taylor, systematized by Armour, and they are being carried forward today by McGrath, Sweet, Wilkinson, and others working in the speculative tradition. But if Canadians do not know this tradition exists — if they cannot name its thinkers, describe its arguments, or explain how it differs from the American philosophical tradition it has always defined itself against — then they cannot defend it. And a community that cannot articulate what it stands for is a community already being absorbed.
This is where psychological flexibility becomes not just a personal practice but a national imperative. The IACT framework — the integration of ACT’s hexaflex with the philosophical resources of the Canadian speculative tradition — provides a language for what Canada needs to do now. Defusion: stepping back from the stories we have been telling ourselves — that we are just a nicer America, that continental integration was inevitable, that our philosophical traditions are provincial echoes of European originals — and recognizing these as narratives, not facts. Acceptance: facing the reality of the situation without avoidance — we are dependent, we did make the mistakes Grant warned about, and the institutional infrastructure for transmitting our own traditions has been failing for decades. Values: getting clear about what actually matters — community, pluralism, mutual obligation, the speculative depth to ask what persons are and what they owe each other. Committed action: building the infrastructure — the knowledge mobilization systems, the research institutions, the public philosophical culture — that the tradition requires if it is to survive and serve.
This is the raison d’être of the Metapattern Institute. Not to recover a dead tradition, but to activate a living one — and to build the knowledge mobilization infrastructure that the tradition requires if it is to reach the communities that need it. The Metapattern Institute is a digital humanities research and knowledge mobilization hub based in Montréal, operating as an independent research initiative at the intersection of health informatics, integral humanism, and the philosophical traditions this essay has been mapping. It is, in a real sense, an attempt to do what Armour spent his career arguing needed to be done: to make sure the Canadian traditions — in philosophy, in religious thought, in social theory — are seriously pursued, rigorously developed, and made available to the communities that need them.
What does activation look like in practice? It looks like this essay — a public intellectual project that names the tradition, traces its lineages, and argues for its contemporary relevance. It looks like the previous essay on McGrath, which brought a Canadian philosopher’s recovery of the contemplative tradition into conversation with moral psychology and integral theory in a way that the traditional academic channels have not attempted. It looks like the podcast conversations that originally connected me to Kelly, Charet, and the network of scholars carrying this work forward — knowledge mobilization through dialogue, conducted through digital media because the institutional channels had failed to carry it. It looks like the framework itself: IACT as a practical synthesis that takes the Canadian tradition’s philosophical commitments — community over individualism, speculative depth without dogmatic certainty, pluralism as resource — and turns them into methods that real people can use in real communities. Armour was not building a museum. He was building a toolkit. The work now is to use it.
The Institute’s flagship theoretical framework, Integral Awareness and Commitment Training, draws together the streams this essay has been tracing: the speculative philosophical tradition of Armour and Sweet, an updated integral humanism that takes Maritain’s original insight through the post-metaphysical critique and the cognitive revolution, the moral psychology of Grant, Taylor, and Haidt, the functional framework of Hayes’s Acceptance and Commitment Training, the communicative and prosocial frameworks of Habermas and Ostrom, the cognitive science of cultural transmission that Donald’s work represents, the enlargement of the Canadian canon that Saul’s work demands, and the recovery of the contemplative tradition that McGrath’s work represents. It is grounded in the conviction that Canada’s philosophical tradition — its insistence on community, its speculative ambition, its refusal to separate philosophy from religion or politics from the question of what persons are — is not an academic curiosity but a resource adequate to the present emergency.
Armour wrote in The Idea of Canada and the Crisis of Community: “We need to make sure that the Canadian traditions — in music, in literature, in philosophy, in the social sciences — are seriously pursued in every institution. It is not narrow-minded to insist that all those who teach in universities, work in our cultural institutions, and take part in our public services, have a thorough knowledge of the Canadian tradition in their own fields.” That was not a plea for cultural preservation. It was a philosophical argument: a country that does not know its own intellectual tradition cannot articulate what it stands for. And a country that cannot articulate what it stands for will be absorbed by whatever power stands next to it.
Canada does not need to import a philosophy. It does not need to borrow one from Europe or the United States. It has its own — speculative, pluralist, grounded in the irreducible conditions of building community across impossible geography, between three founding nations, in the shadow of an empire that has never stopped trying to absorb it. What it needs is to transform what it has, to face honestly where it has failed, and to put its resources to work with the psychological flexibility and creative determination that the present emergency demands.
The tradition is alive. It has been passed from Watson to Grant to Armour to Saul to McGrath to the scholars and thinkers who are carrying it forward today, often outside the institutions that should be sustaining it. It has been passed through books and through conversations, through classrooms and through podcasts, through the personal relationships that have always been the most resilient form of knowledge transmission — what Donald would recognize as the distributed cognition that sustains any culture’s theoretic achievements, what Innis identified as the medium most resistant to the distortions of empire. When the institutions fail, the conversation continues. It continues in the corridors where Kelly learned Hegel, in the study where Charet reads Jung, in the office at Memorial where McGrath writes on Schelling and remembers his first teacher of metaphysics. It continues in my apartment in Montréal, where a French Canadian formed in the Catholic intellectual tradition sits at his desk and tries to assemble what his country gave him but never taught him to name.
The philosophical tradition that Armour built, that Grant diagnosed, that Saul enlarged, that Taylor theorized, that McGrath and his network are extending — this tradition is adequate to the present emergency. It has the speculative depth to address questions of meaning and value that procedural rationality cannot reach. It has the intellectual humility to hold those questions open rather than forcing premature answers. It has the pluralist architecture to sustain a community of communities across the deepest differences. And it has something else — something Grant’s lament lacked and something the tradition now desperately needs: a constructive vision. Not nostalgia for what was lost, but a working framework for what can be built. Not recovery, but transformation. Not a lament, but an answer.
Armour spent a lifetime demonstrating that Canada has a philosophy. The work now — the urgent, necessary, unfinished work — is to make that philosophy do what it was always meant to do: hold the country together. Not by pretending the differences do not exist, but by going deeper into the heart of facts as they are — which is what speculative philosophy has always meant, and what Canada, at this moment, most needs.
Suggested Reading
Leslie Armour and Elizabeth Trott, The Faces of Reason: An Essay on Philosophy and Culture in English Canada, 1850–1950 (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1981)
Leslie Armour, The Idea of Canada and the Crisis of Community (Steel Rail, 1981)
William Sweet, ed., Idealism, Metaphysics, and Community (Ashgate, 2001)
Robert Meynell, Canadian Idealism and the Philosophy of Freedom: C.B. Macpherson, George Grant, and Charles Taylor (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011)
George Grant, Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (Carleton Library, 1965)
George Grant, Technology and Empire: Perspectives on North America (House of Anansi, 1969)
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Harvard University Press, 1989)
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2007)
Harold Innis, Empire and Communications (Oxford University Press, 1950)
Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication (University of Toronto Press, 1951)
John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West (Free Press, 1992)
John Ralston Saul, The Unconscious Civilization (House of Anansi, 1995)
John Ralston Saul, The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World (Viking, 2005)
John Ralston Saul, A Fair Country: Telling Truths about Canada (Viking, 2008)
John Ralston Saul, The Comeback (Viking, 2014)
Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition (Harvard University Press, 1991)
Sean McGrath, The Dark Ground of Spirit: Schelling and the Unconscious (Routledge, 2012)
Sean McGrath, The Lost Road (Cascade Books, 2025)
James Bradley, Collected Essays in Speculative Philosophy, ed. Sean McGrath (Edinburgh University Press, 2021)
Harold Coward, Fifty Years of Religious Studies in Canada: A Personal Retrospective (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2014)
Jacques Maritain, Integral Humanism (1936; University of Notre Dame Press, 1973)
Eric Wilkinson, “The 49th Parallel: Canadian Philosophy and American Imperialism,” APA Blog (January 2025)
Further Reading from Integral [+] Facticity
“Sean McGrath and the Post-Metaphysical Problem: On The Lost Road and the Need for a New Integral Humanism“ — the companion essay to this one.
“A Rosy Cross of a Book“ — my review of Cadell Last’s Real Speculations.
“Beyond the Master Signifier: Toward a Developmental Account of Psychological Flexibility and Virtue Ethics“ — the full Haidt-Habermas-Hayes synthesis.
“Integral Epistemological Pluralism and the Nature-Spirit Problem“ — my intervention into the Shaul-Žižek-Johnston-Pippin debate.
“When the Body Becomes the Laboratory: Auto-Ethnography, AI-Assisted Research, and the Future of Recovery Science“ — the methodological essay grounding IACT.
“The Return of God and the Future of Integral Humanism“ — my tribute to Fred Dallmayr’s integral pluralism.