La philosophie n'est ni contemplation, ni réflexion, ni communication. Elle est l'activité qui crée les concepts. Comment se distingue-t-elle de ses rivales, qui prétendent nous fournir en concepts? La philosophie doit nous dire quelle est la nature créative du concept, et quels en sont les concomitants : la pure immanence, le plan d'immanence, et les personnages conceptuels. Par là, la philosophie se distingue de la science et de la logique. Celles-ci n'opèrent pas par concepts, mais par fonctions, sur un plan (...) de référence et avec des observateurs partiels. L'art opère par percepts et affects, sur un plan de composition avec des figures esthétiques. La philosophie n'est pas interdisciplinaire, elle est elle-même une discipline entière qui entre en résonance avec la science et avec l'art, comme ceux-ci avec elle : trouver le concept d'une fonction, etc. C'est que les trois plans sont les trois manières dont le cerveau recoupe le chaos, et l'affronte. Ce sont les Chaoïdes. La pensée ne se constitue que dans ce rapport où elle risque toujours de sombrer. (shrink)

In this paper we intend to examine whether there are examples for emergence to be found in physics. The answer depends on the concept of emergence one invokes. We distinguish two such concepts, those of Broad and Kim. We will argue that it is unlikely that there will be examples with respect to the former because it runs counter to an explanatory strategy that is both well entrenched in physical practice and to a certain degree flexible. On the other hand (...) we will argue that all those physical systems that provide an example for supervenience are at the same time examples for emergence - at least if one defines emergence the way Kim does. (shrink)

Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy cuts to the heart of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and of today's science wars.At the start of the 21st Century, ...

More than a simple expository history, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History sketches the outlines of a renewed materialist philosophy of history in the tradition of Fernand Braudel, Gilles Deleuze, and F lix Guattari, while also engaging the critical new understanding of material processes derived from the sciences of dynamics.Following in the wake of his groundbreaking War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, Manuel De Landa presents a radical synthesis of historical development over the last one thousand years. More than (...) a simple expository history, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History sketches the outlines of a renewed materialist philosophy of history in the tradition of Fernand Braudel, Gilles Deleuze, and F lix Guattari, while also engaging the critical new understanding of material processes derived from the sciences of dynamics. Working against prevailing attitudes that see history as an arena of texts, discourses, ideologies, and metaphors, De Landa traces the concrete movements and interplays of matter and energy through human populations in the last millennium. De Landa attacks three domains that have given shape to human societies: economics, biology, and linguistics. In every case, what one sees is the self-directed processes of matter and energy interacting with the whim and will of human history itself to form a panoramic vision of the West free of rigid teleology and naive notions of progress, and even more important, free of any deterministic source of its urban, institutional, and technological forms. Rather, the source of all concrete forms in the West's history are shown to derive from internal morphogenetic capabilities that lie within the flow of matter-energy itself. (shrink)

Paul E. Griffiths argues that most research on the emotions has been as misguided as Aristotelian efforts to study "superlunary objects" - objects...

Contemporary scientific theories assume a primarily micro-deterministic view of nature. This paper explores the question of whether micro-determinism is incompatible with the alleged emergence of properties and laws that some biologists and philosophers assert occurs in various biological systems. I argue that a preferable unified treatment of these emergence claims takes properties, rather than laws, to be the units of emergence. Four distinct conceptions of emergence are explored and three shown to be compatible with micro-determinism. The remaining concept of emergence, (...) direct macro-determination, does not, I argue, meet the general requirement that an adequate scientific explanation provide a coherent mechanism or effective means of determination. (shrink)

In Natural-Born Cyborgs, Clark argues that what makes humans so different from other species is our capacity to fully incorporate tools and supporting cultural ...

"Mille Plateaux (Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1980) est le second des deux volumes ayant pour sous-titre Capitalisme et schizophrénie issu de la collaboration entre le philosophe Gilles Deleuze et le philosophe et psychanalyste Félix Guattari. Cet ouvrage continue à explorer par des voies inédites - en s'attaquant notamment à une série d'erreurs afférentes selon les auteurs à l'arborescence, à l'État, au langage... - la question déjà avancée dans L'Anti-Œdipe (premier volume) d'une ontologie révolutionnaire des devenirs ("presque imperceptibles") qui ne cessent (...) de défaire l'histoire des identités ("primauté des lignes de fuite") et de produire des "coups" imprévisibles au sociologue et au militant. Sans doute le livre politique de Deleuze et Guattari le plus important, grâce à sa conception originale du pluralisme (l'individu n'y est pas conçu comme fondement de l'organisation sociale : les subjectivités sociales sont toujours au-dessus ou en dessous du niveau de l'individu, composant et décomposant des collectivités de toutes sortes)"--Wikipedia = Mille Plateaux (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1980) is the second of two volumes which comes in the series of Capitalism and Schizophrenia is a result of collaboration between the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, philosopher and psychoanalyst. This book continues to explore new paths - including addressing a series of errors by the authors related to the tree, the state, the language... - that are already dealt with in Anti-Oedipus (first volume) of an ontology of revolutionary futures; the latter continues to unravel the history of identities ("primacy of lines of flight") and produce "coups" unforeseeable to the sociologist and activist. No doubt the political book of Deleuze and Guattari's is the most important, with its original conception of pluralism (the individual is not conceived as the foundation of social organization: social subjectivities are always above or below of the individual level, composing and decomposing communities of all kinds).". (shrink)

This is the first book to use complexity theory to open up the 'geophilosophy' developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, Anti-Oedipus and What is Philosophy?.

God has been called many things, but perhaps nothing so strange as the name of “lobster” which he receives in A Thousand Plateaus.1 Is this simple profanation a pendant to the gleeful anti-clericalism of Deleuze2, for whom there is no insult so wretched as that of “priest”?3 Certainly, on one level. But it is also a clue to Deleuze’s ability to use a traditional concern of theology, the name of God, to intervene in the most basic questions of Western philosophy, (...) in this case, the interchange of theology, biology and politics inherent in the question of nature and the organism. (shrink)

A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia is a playful and emphatically practical elaboration of the major collaborative work of the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. When read along with its rigorous textual notes, the book also becomes the richest scholarly treatment of Deleuze's entire philosophical oeuvre available in any language. Finally, the dozens of explicit examples that Brian Massumi furnishes from contemporary artistic, scientific, and popular urban culture make the book an important, perhaps even central text within (...) current debates on postmodern culture and politics.Capitalism and Schizophrenia is the general title for two books published a decade apart. The first, Anti-Oedipus, was a reaction to the events of May/June 1968; it is a critique of "state-happy" Marxism and "school-building" strains of psychoanalysis. The second, A Thousand Plateaus, is an attempt at a positive statement of the sort of nomad philosophy Deleuze and Guattari propose as an alternative to state philosophy.Brian Massumi is Professor of Comparative Literature at McGill University. (shrink)

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“What is an emotion?” William James asked that question in the title of an essay he wrote in 1884, and his answer was that an emotion is a sensation brought about by bodily disturbance. Writing as a psychologist, he was concerned to help turn his discipline into a science. But as a philosopher writing about religious faith, by contrast, James argued that emotions must be understood in terms of such large and fuzzy issues as “the meaning of life.” The philosophy (...) of emotions and emotions research has since gone off in two quite different directions, one a broad-based perennial philosophical concern with the proper place of the emotions in ethics and living well, the other an increasingly sophisticated pursuit of the latest ammunition and theoretical weaponry in the biological and neurological sciences. (shrink)

Bhaskar's articulation of his ‘transcendental realism' includes an argument for a form of causal emergence which would mean the rejection of physicalism, by means of rejecting the causal closure of the physical. His argument is based on an analysis of the conditions for closure, where closed systems manifest regular or Humean relations between events. Bhaskar argues that the project of seeking closure entails commitment to a strong reductionism, which in turn entails the impossibility of science itself, and concludes that we (...) should endorse causal emergence. I argue that Bhaskar's case grossly overreaches itself, and that he fails to establish the emergentist conclusions which he asserts. Consequently his programme poses no significant threat to physicalism. (shrink)

_Germinal Life_ is the sequel to the highly successful _Viroid Life_. Where _Viroid Life_ provided a compelling reading of Nietzsche's philosophy of the human, _Germinal Life_ is an original and groundbreaking analysis of little known and difficult theoretical aspects of the work of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. In particular, Keith Ansell Pearson provides fresh and insightful readings of Deleuze's work on Bergson and Deleuze's most famous texts _Difference and Repetition_ and _A Thousand Plateaus_. _Germinal Life _also provides new insights into (...) Deleuze's relation to some of the most original thinkers of modernity, from Darwin to Freud and Nietzsche, and explores the connections between Deleuze and more recent thinkers such as Adorno and Merleau-Ponty. (shrink)

With the advent of the Human Genome Project there have been many claims for the genetic origins of complex human behavior including insanity, criminality, and intelligence. But what does it really mean to call something 'genetic'? This is the fundamental question that Sahotra Sarkar's book addresses. The author analyses the nature of reductionism in classical and molecular genetics. He shows that there are two radically different kinds of reductionist explanation: genetic reduction (as found in classical genetics) and physical reduction (found (...) in molecular genetics). This important book clarifies the meaning of the term 'genetic', shows how molecular studies have affected genetics, and provides the philosophical background necessary to understand the debates over the Human Genome Project. It will be of particular interest to professionals and students in the philosophy of science, the history of science, and the social studies of science, medicine, and technology. (shrink)