Abstract

Abstract This paper aims at the construction of a structural coupling between object-oriented philosophy and Whitehead’s philosophy of organism by making a case for the primacy of the ontological principle through the proposal of a social object hypothesis. The social object here differs from traditional renderings of sociology, which are centered on humans’ activity and personalities, by way of recuperating Tarde’s social theory of associations. This theory provides us with a non-anthropocentric reading of sociality. This hypothesis will be furthered by the introduction of the systemic category of internal/external, or system/environment, as a self-enclosure feature of social objects. Equipped with these two notions, we will discuss Graham Harman’s paper “Whitehead and Schools X, Y, and Z,” while rerouting his assessments to our own social object hypothesis. The final idea is to propose an alliance through the conception of a macro-ontological approach to philosophy of organism. We intend to show that this is not only coherently feasible regarding Whitehead’s own categoreal scheme, but also meets the requirements of being a real object in object-oriented ontology’s directives.

Highlights

  • Before we begin,[1] I would like to state clearly that my purpose here is not to exercise a purely scholastic or exegetical labor upon Alfred N

  • This paper aims at the construction of a structural coupling between object-oriented philosophy and Whitehead’s philosophy of organism by making a case for the primacy of the ontological principle through the proposal of a social object hypothesis

  • These clearly share a certain kinship with the trends of speculative realism, the complex realism in metaphysics, the ontological turn in social theory, and similar umbrella-terms

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Summary

Introduction

Before we begin,[1] I would like to state clearly that my purpose here is not to exercise a purely scholastic or exegetical labor upon Alfred N. Whitehead’s Process and Reality, but to speculate with it and beyond it Such is the spirit, I believe, of the experimental metaphysics Whitehead himself defends in the opening of said book. Our discussion will feature a few elements coming from systems theory (mainly Niklas Luhmann’s) and categoreal analysis (Nicolai Hartmann) These clearly share a certain kinship with the trends of speculative realism, the complex realism in metaphysics, the ontological turn in social theory, and similar umbrella-terms. The general idea is to show how orthodox OOO and Whiteheadian scholars could benefit from each other in the new alliance we propose in the third part of this paper: a macro-ontological approach to the philosophy of organism through the concept of the social object that, as we will see, emerges from Process and Reality. We will summarise our research by comparing it with Harman’s assessments, and propose a few directives we believe may be inspiring for a contemporary global philosophy

Overview of Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology
Undermining and overmining
Thing-in-itself
Whitehead and process
Whitehead and becoming
Whitehead and relations
Final analysis of Harman’s take on Whitehead
Towards a Whiteheadian Object-Oriented Philosophy
Conclusion
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