“Whitehead’s Transcendental Cosmology” By James Bradley

I’ve been thoroughly enjoying Collected Essays in Speculative Philosophy: James Bradley (2021; edited by Sean J. McGrath). Bradley is criminally under-appreciated, but this collection is sure to change that. While reading McGrath’s wonderful introduction, I noted his footnote (p. 7) about an as yet untranslated article Bradley published in the French journal Archives de philosophie, wherein he describes Whitehead’s self-titled “organic realism” as a “transcendental cosmology.”

The article, titled “La Cosmologie Transcendantale de Whitehead: La Transformations Peculative du Concept de Construction Logique” (1993), won high praise from Gilles Deleuze, who wrote to Bradley to congratulate him for its insightfulness.

I decided to attempt a translation (with help from ChatGPT), which I am sharing below. Here is the original French version. I did my best despite very poor French to catch mistakes and infelicities, but be aware this is an imperfect rendering. I’ll be re-reading this remarkable article over the next several days, and so will likely tweak and improve the translation over time.