On Whitehead and Deleuze: The Process of Materiality

In his long career, Whitehead was, variously, a mathematician, speculative physicist, historian of science, philosopher of science, and philosopher in his own right. As such, he occupies a perhaps unique place within recent western thought. Not only did he advance scientific thought, he also developed a novel, systematic philosophical understanding of science based on a deep historical appreciation of both its theoretical premises and its practical procedures. Whitehead did not dismiss science, he did not see it as divorced from philosophy, nor did he accept the premises which, he maintained, still inform much of modern science. One of Whitehead’s great achievements, which will be taken up later in this paper, is his insistence that science, philosophy, the humanities, and social theory all require a renewed conception of nature (in the broadest sense of the word), one which goes beyond strict scientific limitations, beyond any form of biological essentialism or reliance upon some notion of the ultimate laws of physics or nature. Through his philosophy of organism, Whitehead aims to develop a concept of nature that is able to incorporate all existence, thereby bringing together the empirical, the material, the social, the aesthetic, and thinking beings.