In 1988 the philosopher Gilles Deleuze remarked that throughout his career he had always been 'circling around' a concept of nature. Showing how Deleuze weaves original readings of Plato, the Stoics, Aristotle, and Epicurus into some of his most famous arguments about event, difference, and problem, MichaelJames Bennett argues that these interpretations of ancient Greek physics provide vital clues for understanding Deleuze's own conception of nature. -/- "Deleuze and Ancient Greek Physics" delves into the original Greek and (...) Latin texts and situates Deleuze's interpretations in relation to contemporary scholarship on ancient philosophy. It reveals that these readings are both more complex and controversial than they may at first appear. Generating both new critical analyses of Deleuze and an appreciation for his classical erudition, this book will be a valuable resource for anyone interested in ancient Greek philosophy, Deleuze's philosophical project, or his unique methodology in the history of philosophy. (shrink)
Deleuze and Evolutionary Theory gathers together contributions by many of the central theorists in Deleuze studies who have led the way in breaking down the boundaries between philosophical and biological research. They focus on the significance of Deleuze and Guattari’s engagements with evolutionary theory across the full range of their work, from the interpretation of Darwin in Difference and Repetition to the symbiotic alliances of wasp and orchid in A Thousand Plateaus. In this way, they explore the anthropological, social and (...) biopolitical significance of the convergences and divergences between philosophy and evolutionary science. (shrink)
This paper investigates the connection between Henri Bergson’s biological epistemology and his moral theory. Specifically, it examines the distinction between the morality of what Bergson calls “closed” and “open” societies in his late work Two Sources of Morality and Religion. I argue that “open” morality provides the moral correlate of a non-instrumentalizing orientation toward nature. Here Bergson’s thought is disposed toward a very specific kind of environmental ethic, an aesthetic one. Bergson’s characterization of open morality, especially in the image of (...) the mystic individual, indicates that through artistic consciousness open morality imitates the creative evolution of life. (shrink)
The standard position on moral perfection and gratuitous evil makes the prevention of gratuitous evil a necessary condition on moral perfection. I argue that, on any analysis of gratuitous evil we choose, the standard position on moral perfection and gratuitous evil is false. It is metaphysically impossible to prevent every gratuitously evil state of affairs in every possible world. No matter what God does—no matter how many gratuitously evil states of affairs God prevents—it is necessarily true that God coexists with (...) gratuitous evil in some world or other. Since gratuitous evil cannot be eliminated from metaphysical space, the existence of gratuitous evil presents no objection to essentially omnipotent, essentially omniscient, essentially morally perfect, and necessarily existing beings. (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)
Kyle MichaelJames Shuttleworth traces the historical development of the ethics of authenticity in relation to the rise of social freedom and individualism. Traversing the German Idealists, Habermas, Foucault, and MacIntyre, Shuttleworth proposes a socio-existential account of ethical authenticity, using Taylor and Sartre. Moving beyond virtue ethics, discourse ethics and Foucauldian notions of self-care, The History and Ethics of Authenticity constructs a practical ethics of authenticity which makes use of contemporary reference points, including the rise of social media, (...) capitalist branding, and competing appeals to identity, resulting in a presentation of the ethics of authenticity as an achievable ethical ideal. (shrink)
In their paper exploring patient ambivalence in the context of medical decision-making Bryanna Moore, et al. state, “While bioethicists have not paid much attention to ambivalence and related menta...
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)
This paper reconstructs Gilles Deleuze’s interpretation of Epicurean atomism, and explicates his claim that it represents a problematic idea, similar to the idea exemplified in early, “barbaric” accounts of the differential calculus. Deleuzian problematic ideas are characterized by a mechanism through whose activity the components of the idea become determinate in relating reciprocally to one another, rather than in being determined exclusively in relation to an extrinsic paradigm or framework. In Epicurean atomism, as Deleuze reads it, such a mechanism of (...) determination can be found in the famous atomic “swerve”. It is necessary to bear this interpretation of Epicurean atomism in mind when understanding Deleuze and Guattari’s promulgation of a new image of thought in What is Philosophy? , which has an explicitly Epicurean inspiration. The paper argues that this inspiration is particularly evident to the extent that Deleuze and Guattari identify the sub-representative feature that lies at the heart of their new image of thought with “chaos”, defined as “infinite speed”. I claim that infinite speed, this otherwise puzzling feature of What is Philosophy? , ought to be understood in the light of Deleuze’s interpretation of Epicurus. Moreover, the Epicurean distinctions between different speeds must be read together with Deleuze’s appropriation of the metaphysics of the ancient Stoics, who, although widely recognized as Deleuze’s Hellenistic counterparts, lack important theoretical resources that the Epicureans provide for Deleuze. (shrink)
This paper reports on a case study which aims to recreate the hearing voices symptom in schizophrenia. The case study was submitted for a co-curricular module at King’s College London by a first-year undergraduate Music student, Bethany James, and was created using the web application, Mahara. The core of the case study consists of a soundscape of both everyday and unusual sounds, in conjunction with an original musical composition. The paper describes the case study and discusses it using chaos (...) narrative as an analytical lens. The paper argues that the case study effectively evokes the hearing voices symptom, conveying a lucid sense of the experience to non-sufferers and thus potentially creating use value for clinicians and care workers. (shrink)
James J. Gibson is one of the best known and perhaps most controversial visual theorists of the twentieth century. Writing in the vein of the American functionalists, and immersed in their profound sense of pragmatism, Gibson sought to establish a more rigorous foundation for the study of vision by reworking its most fundamental concepts. Over the five decades of his distinguished career, Gibson brought new clarity to the old problems of the tradition. He offered an alternative theory of perception (...) - one that could accommodate the experimental insights of contemporary research programs. He characterized this new theory as a version of direct perception in order to distinguish it from the traditional indirect approach of Rene Descartes. On Descartes' account, our perceptual awareness of reality comes through the representations we have formed of it within ourselves. In contrast, Gibson's theory of direct perception states that the environment contains all of the information needed to specify its properties. Hence, perceiving these properties is a matter of detecting the information available in the environment. This theory avoids the difficulty of explaining how the mind organizes holistic perceptions from atomic sensations. In what follows, I will attempt to make good these claims by situating the concept of "structure" at the heart of the ecological program. I will argue that this concept is significant precisely because it allows Gibson to locate the moving, perceiving body at the heart of meaningful perceptual experience; an experience which emerges in the dynamical structures that cross the body and the world. (shrink)
The problem of whether perception is direct or if it depends on additional, cognitive contributions made by the perceiving subject, is posed with particular force in an Essay towards a New Theory of Vision. It is evident from the recurrent treatment it receives therein that Berkeley considers it to be one of the central issues concerning perception. Fittingly, the NTV devotes the most attention to it. In this essay, I deal exclusively with Berkeley's treatment of the problem of indirect distance (...) perception, as it is presented in the context of that work. (shrink)
In this paper, an ecologically extended ethic of authenticity is developed in dialogue with the Norwegian environmentalist Arne Naess and the Japanese ethicist Watsuji Tetsurō. More specifically, Naess’s concept of Self-realization is supplemented and supported with Watsuji’s ethic of authenticity and phenomenology of climate. And the ecological potential of Watsuji’s thought is realized in relation to Naess’s ideas of human responsibility and symbiosis. After establishing an ecologically extended ethic of authenticity, the practical application of this concept is then demonstrated in (...) relation to satoyama and the preservation of nature in Japan. Whilst the intended outcome is to develop an ecologically extended ethic of authenticity, a secondary aim is to illustrate the benefit and importance of cross-cultural dialogue to advance philosophical thought and understanding. (shrink)
In the second volume of Rinrigaku, Watsuji Tetsurō focuses on developing his notion of betweenness through the ethical organisations of family, local commun...
Smith has defended the rationalist's conceptual claim that moral requirements are categorical requirements of reason, arguing that no status short of this would make sense of our taking these requirements as seriously as we do. Against this I argue that Smith has failed to show either that our moral commitments would be undermined by possessing only an internal, contextual justification or that they need presuppose any expectation that rational agents must converge on their acceptance. His claim that this rationalistic understanding (...) of metaethics is required for the intelligibility of moral disagreement is also found to be inadequately supported. It is further proposed that the rationalist's substantive claims - that there are such categorical requirements of reason and that our actual moral commitments are a case in point - are liable to disappointment; and that the conceptual claim is fatally undermined by reflection on how we might best respond to such disappointment. (shrink)
Bernard Stielger has recently emerged as one of the most significant and original thinkers in the new generation of French philosophers following Derrida and Deleuze.Drawing on art, anthropology, economics, cultural studies, psychoanalysis, politics and sociology, the essays in this collection, by a range of world-class specialists, are united around Stiegler's key concept of technics, which, he argues, constitutes what it is to be human.Stiegler is revealed as a thinker at the forefront of our contemporary concerns with consumerism, technology, inter-generational division, (...) political apathy and economic crisis. His ambitious project goes beyond these sources of social distress to uncover and examine precisely 'what makes life worth living'. (shrink)
In this article we examine the sonic framing of place. Our theoretical approach combines Goffman’s microsociology (and its sociology of music/sound studies off-shoots) with an account of sound in the urban atmospheres literature. Drawing on the work of French urban sociologist Jean-Paul Thibaud and associated work on sound in urban environments by the CRESSON research centre, we propose that sound frames activity in particular ways, including by infusing self and space with a certain tone, and by rendering places more or (...) less hospitable. In the latter part of the article, we examine Quiet Hour shopping as a case study in the sonic constitution and transformation of places. We conclude by reflecting on whether the social and cultural theoretical analysis of sound has suffered from a ‘noise bias’, and whether the ‘resonances’ of public places is a new frontier in both sociological research and in the politics of cities. (shrink)
Real-time cognition is continuous in time and contiguous in mental state space. This temporal continuity implies that the majority of mental life is spent in states that are partially consistent with multiple representations. The state-space contiguity implies that different cognitive processes interact in ways that make them quite non-modular. As the evidence for such information-permeability expands to include not just neural subsystems but also the entire brain and even the entire organism, this radical interactionism leads one to hypothesize that mental (...) activity, and perhaps consciousness itself, is something that emerges amid the interface between one's body and one's environment. We portray mental activity as a continuous trajectory through a brain-body-environment state space, where close visitations with labelled attractors may constitute reportable self- consciousness and traversals through unlabeled regions may constitute unutterable immediate conscious awareness. (shrink)
This introduction positions the special issue by highlighting the inherent relationality of place as well as how place is not just an object of analysis but something that shapes thinking, writing and experiences of the world. We reflect on why sociology has found it somewhat more difficult than its social science counterparts to give place the centrality it merits, and discuss whether this reflects a problem with dealing with questions of ‘scale’ and thinking the ‘in-betweenness’ of place. We assess important (...) formulations of place in recent place theories, including non-essentialist framings of place such as ‘progressive’ and as ‘assemblage’. We make a case for seeing the articles in this special issue (and Thesis Eleven’s own long history of publishing writing on the topic of place) as resonating with the themes of place as materiality, atmospheres and spaces of belonging. (shrink)
In this article, I examine an ostensible case of the reincarnation type previously investigated and analyzed by Jim Tucker, M.D. of the University of Virginia. The case concerns James Leininger, a young boy who beginning around age two in 2000 and for several years thereafter began exhibiting behaviors and making claims that were later believed to resemble the life and death of World War II fighter pilot James Huston, Jr. The James Leininger story is widely regarded as (...) a superior American case of reincarnation. After a two-year investigation of this case, I present my findings and their implications for the evaluation of this case as evidence for reincarnation. The favorable assessment of the case is based on the assumption that there is a sufficiently robust and credible narrative of James Leininger’s experiences, behaviors, and claims. I will argue that the chronology of events which provide the factual scaffolding of this case is neither robust nor credible, especially with respect to what are presumed to be the case’s strongest features. The official narrative is not robust because it excludes salient contextual details related to James’s exposure to ordinary sources of information which plausibly shaped his experience. The narrative is not credible because the presumed facts of the case are based almost exclusively on the testimony of James Leininger’s parents, but their testimony suffers from a variety of significant credibility problems. These two defects – lack of narrative robustness and credibility – also vitiate Jim Tucker’s investigation and presentation. Consequently, his favorable assessment of this case as evidence for reincarnation is unwarranted. (shrink)
Pulvermüller restricts himself to an unnecessarily narrow range of evidence to support his claims. Evidence from neural modeling and behavioral experiments provides further support for an account of words encoded as transcortical cell assemblies. A cognitive neuroscience of language must include a range of methodologies (e.g., neural, computational, and behavioral) and will need to focus on the on-line processes of real-time language processing in more natural contexts.
This book offers a new interpretation of William James's ethical and religious thought. Michael Slater shows that James's conception of morality, or what it means to lead a moral and flourishing life, is intimately tied to his conception of religious faith, and argues that James's views on these matters are worthy of our consideration. He offers a reassessment of James's 'will to believe' or 'right to believe' doctrine, his moral theory, and his neglected moral arguments (...) for religious faith. And he argues that James's pragmatic account of religion is based on an ethical view of the function of religion and a realist view of the objects of religious belief and experience, and is compatible with his larger conception of pragmatism. The book will appeal to readers interested in the history of modern philosophy, especially pragmatism, as well as those interested in moral philosophy, religion, and the history of ideas. (shrink)
