Speculative Empiricism

A philosophy of speculative empiricism through 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. Debaise’s reading 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 offers a radically new way of conceiving the relations between experience and speculation. Didier Debaise is a researcher at the FNRS and the Director of the Centre for Research in Philosophy at the Free University of Brussels. Tomas Weber is a PhD student in the Department of French at the University of Cambridge.