Abstract

Contemporary thought, particularly at the hands of individuals such as Richard Rorty, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, has rejected the Enlightenment tradition which placed epistemology at the center of philosophy. A corollary to this rejection is that philosophy, if it exists at all, is no longer the discipline which serves to provide large scale narratives which function to legitimize different discourses. Alfred North Whitehead agrees with the rejection of Enlightenment thought, but does not reject the possibility of legitimation. Instead he finds that the failure of the Enlightenment demands a broadening of the notion of legitimation which he exemplifies in his attempt to provide a speculative redescription of experience. Whitehead recognizes the epistemological and hermeneutic limitations of his project and argues that any legitimating discourse must be speculative , dependent on particular branches of human knowledge, revisable, and fallible, but it is also the case that such a discourse is a necessary background if anything like Rorty's conversation is to take place. ;This dissertation compares Whitehead's understanding of speculative philosophy with Rorty's claim that conversation is what ought to follow philosophy. In this dissertation I argue that Whitehead can be understood as a postmodern thinker. He is postmodern in that constructive he like Rorty is suspicious of commensuration, rejects representationalism, accepts theory ladeness, and has a hermeneutic conception of the function of reason. At the same time Whitehead is constructive in that he holds that we can give criteria which will help us to decide between competing versions of rationality. Whiteheadian speculation, then, accepts Rorty's criticism of the Enlightenment tradition, while holding that even in a conversation there are criteria which will allows us to draw a distinction between reasonable and unreasonable. ;In the first three chapters I develop my argument for understanding Whitehead as a postmodern thinker. In these chapters I present Whitehead's antirepresentationalism, how he is a hermeneutic thinker, and compare Whitehead's critique of the Cartesian tradition with Rorty's. In Chapter Four I discuss Whitehead's version of speculative philosophy, and in Chapter Five I compare Whitehead's speculative thought with Rorty's discussion of conversation