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.