The Universe between Continuity and Atomism. What stems from what? Concreteness and Abstraction According to C.S. Peirce and A.N. Whitehead

The aim of this paper is to pinpoint the reasons why Charles Sanders Peirce comes to describe the Universe as a continuity, in according to his Synechism’s theory, while Alfred North Whitehead explains it in terms of a concrescence of atomic entities, granted that for both authors the Universe represents a genuine and “creative advancement into novelty” (PR: 28). Generally speaking, if one looks upon the XX Century’s philosophy, Peirce and Whitehead can be regarded as the only ones who tried to develop a “fully articulated philosophic system based upon a rigorous logical and mathematical foundation” (Murphey 1961: 295), by bringing about at the same time a real “renaissance of speculative philosophy” (J. Bradley 2003: 442). In particular, both thinkers elaborated new philosophical perspectives in the light and consideration of the key-topic of life and the evolutionary researches on it. As Whitehead said: “The status of life in nature [...] is the central meeting point of all the strains of systematic thought, humanistic, naturalistic, philosophic” (MT: 202) and significantly his thought means to be an Organic Philosophy. Moreover, Peirce elucidated: “The naturalists are the great builders of conceptions; there is no other branch of science where so much of this work is done as in theirs; and we must, in great measure, take them for our teachers in this important part of logic” (CP: 2.464). In other words, their logic and metaphysics reflect and take into account the suggestions brought into light by biological and physical studies and discoveries. From this perspective, the present paper analyzes this kind of logical, cosmological and metaphysical involvements, and compare their fundamental conceptions of universe.