Motivating Metaphysics: From Radical Empiricism to Process

Abstract

This chapter explores motivations for speculative thinking in terms of the respective risks of certainty and creativity. Following their interests in thinking conditions of novelty and creativity, both Whitehead and Deleuze challenge Kantian meta-philosophical criteria that privilege apodictic certainty. The chapter then explores how such speculative thinking has historical roots in William James’ radical empiricism and especially the concept of pure experience. It shows how Whitehead’s diagnosis of the “bifurcation of nature” arising out of inconsistent commitments to metaphysical materialism and epistemic empiricism is refigured through radical empiricism. Finally, it raises the possibility of a realism that does not presume the necessary locus of a constituted metaphysical subject.