Delimitation and individuality in Leibniz and Whitehead

Abstract

This article investigates the symmetries and singularities that link the philosophies of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Alfred North Whitehead around a shared ontological concern: the delimitation of the individual. Based on a cross-reading of Leibniz’s Metaphysical Foundations of Mathematics and Whitehead’s Modes of Thought, it argues that both thinkers elaborate their respective conceptions of the individual from a distinctive intersection between mathematics and philosophy, where limits ¾point, path, trace, cut, process¾ operate as conditions of possibility for any differentiated entity. The article is structured in two parts: the first reconstructs what may be called a Leibnizian theory of delimitations, articulating some characteristic notions of his thought; the second examines how Whitehead critically inscribes himself in that problematic core in order to develop a proposal that is both relative to it and novel. In doing so, we do not seek to trace an intersystemic assimilation between the two authors, but rather to recognize certain convergences despite the irreducible distances that separate them, showing that their relevance lies in having problematized the very status of individuality without abstracting it from a constitutive horizon of relations and universe.