The Heidegger–Deleuze relationship has attracted significant attention of late. This paper contributes to this line of research by examining Deleuze’s claim, recently reiterated and developed by Philip Tonner, that Heidegger offers a univocal conception of Being where there is one sense of Being that is said throughout all entities. Although these authors maintain that this claim holds across Heidegger’s oeuvre, I purposefully adopt a conservative hermeneutical strategy that focuses on two writings from the 1927–1928 period—Being and Time and the following (...) year’s lecture course translated as The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic—and emphasize the lesson of the ontological difference that Being is always the Being of an entity, to argue that with regards to these texts, at least, an alternative equivocal interpretation is possible in which Being is always said differently. The conclusion draws out the implications of this for the relationship between Heidegger’s fundamental ontology and Deleuze’s differential ontology. (shrink)

This paper reviews Deleuze’s theory of language in Logic of Sense, and Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of language in A Thousand Plateaus. In the ontology informed by the Stoics described in those books, human being and language do not exist separately but in a mixture of words and things. The author argues that this flattened ontology of surfaces is incommensurable with the ontology of depth used in conventional humanist qualitative methodology and recommends beginning new empirical inquiry with a concept instead (...) of with method and methodology. (shrink)

In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari critique the relationship between formal logic and philosophy. They argue that since philosophy is the creation of concepts that are intensional, and formal logic reduces concepts to their extension, formal logic then has no special providence to decide philosophical questions. This may strike the logic-inclined philosopher as outdated given that there are now formal intensional logics designed to model meaning rather than reference. However, it will be shown that these logics too fail to (...) express the concept in a way that preserves its philosophical import. Doing so requires contrasting Deleuze and Guattari's account of the concept with Frege's to show how the latter persists even in intensional logics in the form of mathematical functions that are ultimately referential. This then results in support for Deleuze and Guattari's claim that formal logic is a useful tool, but that it is incapable of adjudicating philosophical disputes. (shrink)

The arguments of the Stoic Chrysippus recorded in Cicero's De Fato are of great importance to Deleuze's conception of events in The Logic of Sense. The purpose of this paper is to explicate these arguments, to which Deleuze's allusions are extremely terse, and to situate them in the context of Deleuze's broader project in that book. Drawing on contemporary scholarship on the Stoics, I show the extent to which Chrysippus' views on compatibilism, hypothetical inference and astrology support Deleuze's claim that (...) the Stoics developed a theory of compatibilities and incompatibilities of events independent of corporeal states of affairs. (shrink)

Deleuze never explicitly formulates his philosophy of logical truth‐values. It thus remains an open question as to the number and types he held there to be. Despite his explicit comments on these matters, additional textual evidence suggests that in his thinking on the event, he favored a third truth‐value, holding either the analetheic view that some truth‐bearers can be truth‐valueless or the dialetheic view that some truth‐bearers can be both true and false. I first argue that taking a logical approach (...) to Deleuze's thinking is feasible, despite his and others' claims that might suggest otherwise. Next, I examine his explicit statements to show that they cannot be taken at face value and that, rather, we need to transpose his claims into contemporary terminology in order to accurately assess them. I lastly turn to his Leibniz‐inspired philosophy of time to argue that the affirmations involved in this conception strongly suggest a dialetheic tendency in his thinking. (shrink)

Deleuze and Guattari’s manner of distinguishing science from philosophy in their last collaboration What is Philosophy? seems to imply a hierarchy, according to which philosophy is more adequate to the reality of virtual events than science is. This suggests, in turn, that philosophy has a better claim than science to truth. This paper clarifies Deleuze‘s views about truth throughout his career. Deleuze equivocates over the term, using it in an “originary” and a “derived” sense, probably under the influence of Henri (...) Bergson, who does similarly. Moreover, William James and pragmatism were to Bergson what the early analytic philosophers Frege and Russell are to Deleuze: excessively scientistic foils whose confusions about truth arise as a result of failing to distinguish science from philosophy. By situating Deleuze’s conception of truth in relation to the early Heidegger’s, which it to some extent resembles, the paper concludes by suggesting that, surprisingly, neither kind of truth Deleuze licenses applies to science, while both apply to philosophy. Science is indifferent to truth in the way that some of Deleuze‘s readers have incorrectly wanted to say that he thinks philosophy is. (shrink)

New materialist frameworks have increasingly repudiated dualistic thinking and challenged representationalist views, which hold that discursive practices mediate our access to the material world. As it has become clear that the material cannot be considered inert, important questions concerning agency, politics and subjectivity have been raised. But while the significance of corporeality has been emphasised, Elizabeth Grosz, in an interview on her most recent book, The Incorporeal, notes that: ‘If materialism cannot account for the immaterial events we experience and articulate, (...) then it has a clear limit that it needs to address.’ An important question this raises in terms of the mutual conditionings of love and one I will address is: How can we account for the immaterial space and time tracings of love without negating the material in the process? To answer this, I turn to Deleuze's The Logic of Sense. (shrink)

Michel Serres said that history is the propagation of effects, saying in his conversations with Bruno Latour, “we experience time as much in our inner senses as externally in nature, as much as le temps of history as le temps of weather,” characterized more by turbulence than by Euclidean geometry. Setting out from Serres’ nautical meditation on noise, guided by Giuseppe Longo’s and interlocutors’ characterization of the random as a function of theory and measure, one can distinguish the random from (...) the non-schematizable noisy. How do we think given the noisy dynamics of the world? Bernard Stiegler’s epiphylogenetic technologies and Gilbert Simondon’s transindividuating technics prepares considering thought as collective as well as individual activity. After sallies into algorithmic technology to establish its limits, we consider how epiphylogenetic thought develops in the presence of indeterminacy. We return to noise not as a simple veil between the discernible and indiscernible, but as a constitutive aspect of the complexification and enrichment of developmental ontologies, an enrichment co-articulated by epiphylogenetic imagination and technics. (shrink)