Philosophy becomes speculative when it raises questions about the ultimate nature of being and thought. What does it mean to be? What does it mean to think? How are being and thought related? What does it mean to ask these questions? These questions have occupied a central place in philosophy throughout history, but have led a shadow existence in twentieth-century thought, which has cut the tie between reason and these fundamental questions, leaving the questions in the twilight, and reason instrumentalised. (...) A.N. Whitehead (1861-1947), one of the founders of analytic philosophy and co-author (with Bertrand Russell) of Principia Mathematica, is one of the few contemporary thinkers to have developed an explicit speculative philosophy. Unsurprisingly, his philosophy has played a marginal role in academic debates. In this study, the methodological foundation of Whitehead’s speculative thought is reconstructed. On the basis of a systematic and historical examination of the nature of the question of being, Whiteheads ontology of the event as the passage into novelty emerges in its full scope, allowing the reader to understand why and to what extent Whitehead has walked a different path than other contemporary thinkers. His philosophy contains a conception of reason that is not alien to newness and creativity while being more than procedural or pragmatic, and a mode of understanding existence that brings out the acuteness of freedom, value and legitimacy, as well as the unity of things, of thought and nature. In order to show what is really happening in this philosophy, the received interpretation of Whitehead’s ontology is radically dismantled. The central thought, that to be means to happen, is explained in a process of reiteration and gradual clarification, examining traditional philosophical problems in metaphysics and epistemology (on topics like: nature and matter, knowledge, categorical structure, freedom and necessity, truth and meaning, modality) from its perspective. What emerges is a philosophy in which the temporality of being, when taken seriously, changes the status of familiar problems and dualisms and offers possibilities for thought, which previously did not exist. Whitehead “hears” the classical questions of philosophy in a new way. Beyond the trenches of twentieth-century philosophy, Whitehead’s speculative thinking contains many elements that will be of value to those studying the foundations of thought today and looking for new directions. In a time when the dualism of nature and man is maintained cynically in our economies and dismantled, but only in a biologistic fashion and therefore only seemingly, as a cover-up, in science and philosophy, Whitehead’s new and creative way of hearing, and answering, old questions about ultimate concerns, when understood properly, is more up to date than ever before. (shrink)

Samuel Alexander was an important figure in the rise of realism in the early twentieth century. Alongside Moore and Russell he forwarded the cause of realism in England with a systematic exposition of a realist metaphysics in his magnum opus Space, Time and Deity (1920). This volume is a collection of essays on Alexander’s philosophy, ranging from his metaphysics of spacetime, theory of categories, epistemology and account of perception, naturalism, and interpretations of reactions by R.G. Collingwood and John Anderson.

Hermann Grassmann's Ausdehnungslehre of 1844 and his Lehrbuch der Arithmetik of 1861 are landmark works in mathematics; the former not only developed new mathematical fields but also both contributed to the setting of modern standards of rigor. Their very modernity, however, may obscure features of Grassmann's view of the foundations of mathematics that were not adopted since. Grassmann gave a key role to the learning of mathematics that affected his method of presentation, including his emphasis on making initial assumptions explicit. (...) In order to better understand this less well-known aspect of his work it will help to examine why some commentators have overlooked his theme of unifying logic, pedagogy and foundations, while others have recognised it. (shrink)

This paper contributes to a growing body of philosophical and psychological work that draws parallels between the writings of William James and Alfred North Whitehead1. In Part One I introduce Whitehead’s distinction between assemblage and systematization (section 1) and suggest that Whitehead’s philosophy was in part a systematization of James’ psychological and philosophical assemblage (section 2). The systematization is based on a rethinking of the entity/function contrast (section 3) by way of Whitehead’s concept of the actual entity/occasion (section 4). This (...) permits a process- oriented ontological extension and James’ notion of pure experience (sections 5 & 6), which yields a deepened version of radical empiricism (section 7). The four sections of Part Two build a more specific argument that James’ often implicit distinctions between energetic, perceptual, conceptual and discursive modes of experience can be systematized by way of Whitehead’s concepts of causal efficacy, presentational immediacy and symbolic reference. Following the suggestion of Magritte’s famous Ceci n’est pas une Pipe artwork, this yields an analysis of the sum of human experience into four progressively integrated factors: power, image, proposition and enunciation. (shrink)

The relationship between James and Whitehead has been underlined from the very outset by the critical scholarship on Whitehead, as is testified by the presence of articles that appeared before the author’s death. By dissociating myself from the radical interpretation that frames Whitehead’s speculative opus as a systematization of James’s ideas, I survey that confrontation which has been advanced in the last years (Weber 2002, 2003, 2011, Sinclair 2009) in order to provide further contribution, by tackle the problem of novelty. (...) Precisely, I concentrate on those instances, especially the methodological ones, which are not simply akin, but rather properly shared by the authors. In other words, I focus on those grounding ideas from which they endorse a pluralistic universe, conceived in connection with the problem of novelty. Properly, 1) I analyze the way Whitehead refers to James in his books; 2) I compare the roles they acknowledge to reason, in the nexus with the concept of experience; 3) I show the importance both authors ascribe to the problem of novelty, the main topic involved in their efforts to build up new cosmologies. (shrink)