'Reason, Causation and Compatibility with the Phenomena' strives to give answers to the philosophical problem of the interplay between realism, explanation and experience. This book is a compilation of essays that recollect significant conceptions of rival terms such as determinism and freedom, reason and appearance, power and knowledge. This title discusses the progress made in epistemology and natural philosophy, especially the steps that led from the ancient theory of atomism to the modern quantum theory, and from mathematization to analytic philosophy. (...) Moreover, it provides possible gateways from modern deadlocks of theory either through approaches to consciousness or through historical critique of intellectual authorities. This work will be of interest to those either researching or studying in colleges and universities, especially in the departments of philosophy, history of science, philosophy of science, philosophy of physics and quantum mechanics, history of ideas and culture. Greek and Latin Literature students and instructors may also find this book to be both a fascinating and valuable point of reference. (shrink)

Gilles Deleuze takes up the challenge to create a philosophy of the interesting, the remarkable and the unusual. He does this in what Alain Badiou calls the ‘‘Grand Style’’, the style of Descartes, Spinoza and Kant whose philosophies arise in relation to developments in the natural sciences and mathematics. Grounding himself in the molar-molecular pair, Deleuze sets out a new image of thought. He conceptualises an immanent but still relatively closed, deterministic, atomistic and reversible system that is not immediately reduced (...) to entropic equilibrium because its processes take place on the molecular level, at speeds which he hypothesises are beyond the speed of light. He postulates a manifold, a sphere of immanence that is the entire universe and not merely the Earth or our solar system. It is a system governed by sensitivity to initial starting points and unstable boundaries, thus although it is chaotic as well as probabilistic, it remains a mathematically formal, deterministic system. (shrink)