Speculative Empiricism: Revisiting Whitehead

A radically new philosophy of experience and speculation, based on a reading of Whitehead's Process and Reality

Can experience be thought systematically without transforming the richness of the world as it is lived into reductive philosophical generalities? Can the method of empiricism ever be reconciled with a method of systematic cosmological speculation?

Didier Debaise's reading of Whitehead shows clearly what a philosophy that makes this possible looks like, how it works and what is at stake. He focuses in on Whitehead's attempt to construct a metaphysical system of everything in the universe that exists whilst simultaneously claiming that it can account for every element of our experience: everything enjoyed and perceived, willed or thought.

Didier Debaise is Director of the Centre for Research in Philosophy at the Free University of Brussels.

Tomas Joseph Weber is a doctoral candidate in the Department of French at the University of Cambridge, supervised by Dr Ian James.