speculable

English

Etymology

From Latin speculābilis; compare Middle English speculable.

Adjective

speculable

1. That can be the subject of speculation.
   • 1650, Walter Charleton, transl., A Ternary of Paradoxes. The { Magnetick Cure of Wounds. Nativity of Tartar in Wine. Image of God in Man., London: […] James Flesher for William Lee, translation of original by Joh. Bapt. Van Helmont, page 260:

     And hence is it that when the rational faculty having perpended the convenience and inconvenience, or good and evil of its objects, and ended its act of Deliberation, adhæres unto, or fixes upon one as more convenient then the others; this ſecond act or Adhæſion may be in the general (i. e. on reſpect of things both ſpeculable and practical) […]

   • 1660, Robert Sanderson, Several Cases of Conscience Discussed in Ten Lectures in the Divinity School at Oxford, London: […] Tho. Leach, pages 18–19:

     Firſt, becauſe it is a kind of Memory, for the Intellect reflecting on things Agible, that is, on things done, or to be done, hath a relation to the Conſcience, as the Intellect reflecting on things ſpeculable, hath its relation to the Memory.

   • 1959, Edward Aloysius Pace, James Hugh Ryan, The New Scholasticism, page 77:

     The source from which a scientific proof proceeds is neither something individual as such, nor something universal as such; rather, it is something, a speculable object, taken according to an absolute consideration. And both individuality and universality are outside the absolute consideration of any speculable object which functions as the subject genus of a science, i. e., as the source from which a scientific proof proceeds.

   • 1965, Edward Dwyer Simmons, Essays on Knowledge and Methodology, page 108:

     They are not metaphysical proofs because they do not concern transcendental aspects of things, i.e., speculable objects intrinsically independent of matter for being and for being known.

   • 1966, Richard C. Hinners, Ideology and Analysis: A Rehabilitation of Metaphysical Ontology, Desclée De Brouwer, page 172:

     To be sure, for Aristotle and other Post-Socratic lovers of theory, the world with which they were immediately concerned was not only changing and sensible but also intelligible, objectifiable and speculable. It was not merely a life-world in which they found themselves already existing; it was also a world of speculable objects for their speculable faith.

   • 1966, Edward P. Mahoney, The Early Psychology of Agostino Nifo, page 710:

     Just as the speculative intellect is constituted by all speculable things as they are speculable, so the practical intellect is constituted by operable things as they are operable.

   • 1969, The Thomist, volume XXXIII, page 558:

     The immaterial nature of the intellect requires that the speculable as such be immaterial. Furthermore, the habit of science requires that the speculable be necessary since science is concerned with what cannot be otherwise.

   • 1997, An Introduction to the Metaphysics of St. Thomas Aquinas, Regnery Publishing, →ISBN, page 5:

     Therefore the speculative sciences must be divided according to differences of speculable objects, precisely as such. Now for that speculable entity which is the object of a speculative power, something is required on the part of the intellective power and something on the part of the habitus of science whereby the intellect is perfected.

   • 2006, Ralph McInerny, Praeambula Fidei: Thomism and the God of the Philosophers, Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, →ISBN, page 200:

     Before looking at the ground for mathematical definitions in natural things, let us have before us Thomas’s account of a third order of speculable objects: But there are some 'speculable objects that do not depend on matter in order to be, because they can exist without matter, whether they are never in matter, such as God and the angels, or in some things are in matter and in some not, such as substance, quality, being, potency, act, one and many, and the like, with all of which theology, that is divine science, is concerned, God being the chief among the things it knows;