This paper is an attempt to explicate the relationship between Spinozist expressionism and philosophical constructivism in Deleuze's work through the concept of immanent causality. Deleuze finds in Spinoza a philosophy of immanent causality used to solve the problem of the relation between substance, attribute and mode as an expression of substance. But, when he proceeds to take up this notion of immanent causality found in Spinoza in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze instead inverts it into a modal one such that the (...) identity of substance may be said only of the difference of the modes. Complicating this further, Deleuze and Guattari claim in A Thousand Plateaus that substance, attribute, and mode are each, themselves, multiplicities. What is Philosophy? takes up immanent causality once again, this time through a constructivist lens aimed at resolving the question of the relation between philosophical multiplicities: ‘plane,’ ‘persona,’ and ‘concept.’ By following the different formulations of immanent causality in these works this essay hopes to discover the relationship between Spinozist expressionism and philosophical constructivism in Deleuze's work. (shrink)

In this article I will suggest ways in which adding the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze to the mix can complement and extend the 4EA approach to cognitive science. In the first part of the paper, I will show how the Deleuzean tripartite ontological difference (virtual/intensive/actual) can provide an explicit ontology for dynamical systems theory. The second part will take these ontological notions and apply them to three areas of concern to the 4EA approaches: (a) the Deleuzean concept of the virtual (...) will clarify the ontological status of perceptual capacity as sensorimotor skill; (b) the Deleuzean concept of “intensive individuation” will clarify the ontological status of the genesis of perceptually guided behavior; (c) the Deleuzean critique of confusing the actual and the virtual will enable us to intervene in the realism/idealism debate. These aspects will not be addressed sequentially but will be interwoven into an unfolding argument. (shrink)

When students read Difference and Repetition for the first time, they face two main hurdles: the wide range of sources that Deleuze draws upon and his dense writing style. This Edinburgh Philosophical Guide helps students to negotiate these hurdles, taking them through the text step by step. It situates Deleuze within Continental philosophy more broadly and explains why he develops his philosophy in his unique way. Seasoned Deleuzians will also be interested in Somers-Hall's novel interpretation of Difference and Repetition.

An incisive analysis of Deleuze's philosophy of eventsSean Bowden shows how the Deleuzian event should be understood in terms of the broader metaphysical thesis that substances are ontologically secondary with respect to events. He achieves this through a reconstruction of Deleuze's relation to the history of thought from the Stoics through to Simondon, taking account of Leibniz, Lautman, structuralism and psychoanalysis along the way.This exciting new reading of Deleuze focuses firmly on his approach to events. Bowden also examines and clarifies (...) a number of Deleuze's most difficult philosophical concepts, including sense, problematic Ideas and intensive individuation, and engages with material by Lautman and Simondon that has not yet been translated into English. (shrink)

This article consists of a close reading and explication of several of the central philosophical concepts to be found in Simondon's L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique. It then proceeds to show how not only these concepts, but also Simondon's method for constructing these concepts, are taken up by Gilles Deleuze in Chapter 5 of his Difference and Repetition. In particular, the article shows how Deleuze's characterization of ‘intensive processes of individuation’ is thoroughly Simondonian. The article will also provide the English (...) speaking reader with an introduction to the French language commentary on Simondon and Deleuze. (shrink)

In ancient philosophy life has priority: non-living matter is made intelligible by living activity. The modern evolutionary synthesis reverses this priority: life is a passive result of blind, non-living material processes. But recent work in science and philosophy puts that reversal in question, by emphasizing how living beings are self-organizing and active. “Naturalizing” this new emphasis on living activity requires not simply a return to ancient philosophy but a new ontology, a new concept of nature. To explore that ontology, I (...) draw on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, studying the link between the organism and its environment, the body and the world, as reflecting a nature in which things are already linked in a moving whole. I focus on the topics of expression and movement, putting Merleau-Ponty into conversation with recent discussions in philosophy of science, especially in immunology and in evolutionary theory, and attending to Bergsonian and Hegelian threads in the background of Merleau-Ponty’s thinking. (shrink)

In this paper I examine how well Merleau-Ponty's philosophy can respond to Deleuze's challenge to phenomenology. The Deleuzian challenge is double, that of immanence and that of difference; in other words, the double challenge is what Deleuze calls the paradox of expression. I bring together, in particular, Deleuze's 1969 The Logic of Sense and Merleau-Ponty's 1945 the Phenomenology of Perception, and am able to discover a lot of similarities mainly centered around the notion of a past that has never been (...) present. However, this comparison is not decisive; what alone can decide is an interpretation of expression in Merleau-Ponty's final, unfinished The Visible and the Invisible. (shrink)