We have entered a new era of nature. What remains of the frontiers of modern thought that divided the living from the inert, subjectivity from objectivity, the apparent from the real, value from fact, and the human from the nonhuman? Can the great oppositions that presided over the modern invention of nature still claim any cogency? In Nature as Event, Didier Debaise shows how new narratives and cosmologies are necessary to rearticulate that which until now had been separated. Following William James and Alfred North Whitehead, Debaise presents a pluralistic approach to nature. What would happen if we attributed subjectivity and potential to all beings, human and nonhuman? Why should we not consider aesthetics and affect as the fabric that binds all existence? And what if the senses of importance and value were no longer understood to be exclusively limited to the human?

We have entered a new era of nature. What remains of the frontiers of modern thought that divided the living from the inert, subjectivity from objectivity, the apparent from the real, value from fact, and the human from the nonhuman? Can the great oppositions that presided over the modern invention of nature still claim any cogency? In Nature as Event, Didier Debaise shows how new narratives and cosmologies are necessary to rearticulate that which until now had been separated. Following William James and Alfred North Whitehead, Debaise presents a pluralistic approach to nature. What would happen if we attributed subjectivity and potential to all beings, human and nonhuman? Why should we not consider aesthetics and affect as the fabric that binds all existence? And what if the senses of importance and value were no longer understood to be exclusively limited to the human?

A radically new philosophy of experience and speculation, based on 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. 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.

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.

Lorsque Whitehead publie Proces et realite (1929), il a deja construit une oeuvre importante: les Principia mathematica, An enquiry concerning the principles of natural knowledge, Concept of Nature et Science and the Modern World. Pourtant, c'est a partir de Proces et realite que se met veritablement en place sa philosophie systematique qui fascinera des penseurs aussi differents que Bergson, Dewey, Merleau-Ponty, Wahl ou encore Deleuze. Whitehead y invente avec une extraordinaire fecondite de nouvelles categories qui transforment puissamment le champ de la metaphysique. La presente etude se propose de suivre la construction conceptuelle de Proces et realite, en partant de la question centrale: qu'est-ce qu'un evenement?, et en s'organisant autour de trois problemes distincts: l'identification de la metaphysique a une pensee speculative qui se definit essentiellement comme une methode d'interpretation; l'affirmation du reel comme ensemble de devenirs et de processus d'individuation et non plus de choses et de substances; l'elucidation de l' experience immediate a partir du concept de societe.