IMPARARE AD ABITARE LA CATASTROFE ECOLOGICA
PROSPETTIVE A PARTIRE DALL’EMPIRISMO RADICALE E DAL METODO SPECULTIVO DI ALFRED N. WHITEHEAD
Valeria Cirillo
This article aims to propose the modalities by which Alfred North Whitehead’s metaphysical or speculative period offers practical and situated tools for thinking and practicing new ways of inhabiting the ecological and social crisis we are experiencing. Particularly, I aim to propose how Whitehead’s thought can help to create concepts and practices from a decentred anthropocentric perspective, that is open to multispecies coexistence. In the first part, I will explain how the radical empiricism − taken up by Whitehead from James’ Essays in Radical Empiricism − can offer an ontological model that operates a decentralization of humans in the production of knowledge. In the second part, however, I will focus on the role of speculative philosophy as illustrated by Whitehead: an “important productive method of knowledge”. Isabelle Stenger’s studies proposes speculative philosophy as a method capable of constructing, rethinking, speculating on new concepts and modes of existence. In this direction I will be suggested how this method can be of absolute importance in the age of the Anthropocene. In the final part, I will explore how the speculative method can be a tool for many feminist authors rethinking how to inhabit climate catastrophe from a multispecies perspective to produce concepts and practices that can account for the co-dependence between humans and nonhumans.