Term used by Broad for attempts to synthesize an overall picture of reality as a whole, and of the place of mankind within it. Broad had in mind large-scale philosophies of the kind found in Hegel or Bradley, or many religious pictures of the cosmos. He believed that a major question prompting speculative philosophy was whether ‘discursive form of cognition by means of general concepts can ever be completely adequate to the concrete Reality which it seeks to describe’. The antithesis to speculative philosophy was critical philosophy.