Speculative Empiricism: Revisiting Whitehead

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 Process and Reality 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.
In this way, Debaise illustrates how Whitehead's philosophy gives us a radically new way of conceiving the relations between experience and speculation.

Author: Didier Debaise
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Published: 09/03/2017
Pages: 200
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.65lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.00w x 0.40d
ISBN: 9781474423052

About the Author

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

Tomas Weber is currently completing his PhD in the Department of French at the University of Cambridge, supervised by Dr Ian James.