A revised, expanded and fully up-to-date critical introduction to Deleuze's most important work of philosophy
By critically analysing Deleuze's methods, principles and arguments, James Williams helps ...readers to engage with the revolutionary core of Deleuze's philosophy and take up positions for or against its most innovative and controversial ideas.
New for this editionA new chapter on questions of method around important concepts such as intensity, anarchic distribution, transcendental illusion and distinctnessReflections on the place of judgement and action in Deleuze's work in order to explain its ethical and political dimensionsA new critical section, which guides students through the key debates and oppositions by engaging with latest interpretations of Deleuze by Levi Bryant, Anna Sauvagnargues, Daniel W. Smith, Henry Somers-Hall and Miguel de Beistegui
What is the relationship between “image” and human thinking? What is the role of the concept of “form” in human knowledge? Scholars from the fields of philosophy, cultural studies, the history of ...science, aesthetics, literature, anthropology, mathematics, and biology take historical and theoretical approaches to investigate the connection between the activity of thinking and concepts of image and form.
This book goes beyond a simple study of Newman’s thought and work and seeks to apply his deductions to modern value conflicts. Although it will be of particular relevance to academic readers with ...some prior knowledge of Newman’s works, it may also be of wider interest to students of history, philosophy, theology and spirituality. More generally, its unusual focus on Newman’s epistemology and philosophical deductions, and how these relate to present-day dilemmas, should also attract interest from his many non-academic followers and devotees.
Divine machines Smith, Justin E. H
2011., 20110411, 2011, 2011-04-11
eBook
Though it did not yet exist as a discrete field of scientific inquiry, biology was at the heart of many of the most important debates in seventeenth-century philosophy. Nowhere is this more apparent ...than in the work of G. W. Leibniz. In Divine Machines, Justin Smith offers the first in-depth examination of Leibniz's deep and complex engagement with the empirical life sciences of his day, in areas as diverse as medicine, physiology, taxonomy, generation theory, and paleontology. He shows how these wide-ranging pursuits were not only central to Leibniz's philosophical interests, but often provided the insights that led to some of his best-known philosophical doctrines.
Form and Object Garcia, Tristan; Ohm, Mark Allan; Cogburn, Jon
03/2014
eBook
What is a thing? What is an object? Tristan Garcia decisively overturns 100 years of Heideggerian orthodoxy about the supposedly derivative nature of objects to put forward a new theory of ontology ...that gives us deep insights into the world and our place in it.
« Le “ Je ” de l’homme que je suis, centre d’activités sensées, peut-il s’isoler, se poser dans le vide, enfant trouvé métaphysique ? » Assurément non, pour le philosophe Raymond Ruyer (1902-1987) : ...conscience humaine ne saurait être comprise que comme un cas particulier de l’activité commune à tous les vivants, voire à tout être véritable. Pour Ruyer, toutes les explications mécanistes de l’émergence de la conscience à partir d’une matière inerte ont échoué, il est donc temps de rompre tant avec le dualisme qu’avec le matérialisme mécaniste, pour repenser ensemble et radicalement la conscience, la vie et la matière. Au milieu du xxe siècle, il élabore ainsi une philosophie panpsychiste et finaliste qui fait de la conscience « l’étoffe même du monde ». S’appuyant sur une connaissance solide des sciences de son temps, de l’embryologie à la cybernétique, il s’efforce de montrer que cette version renouvelée du finalisme, inscrite dans la filiation de Leibniz, Schopenhauer, Bergson ou encore Whitehead, correspond bien mieux que le mécanisme à notre connaissance de la vie. Ce faisant, il développe une pensée originale, à l’audace métaphysique certaine, dont les intuitions donnent à voir ce que l’attention au vivant fait aux catégories classiques de la philosophie, et combien elle nous force à les refonder. Ce livre se penche sur les méthodes, les sources et les arguments de la théorie ruyérienne du vivant. Il s’efforce de mettre en évidence ses forces et ses faiblesses, voire ses dangers, quand elle prétend appliquer la « psycho-biologie » à des questions morales, sociales et politiques.
It has long been thought that the ancient Greeks did not take mechanics seriously as part of the workings of nature, and that therefore their natural philosophy was both primitive and marginal. In ...this book Sylvia Berryman challenges that assumption, arguing that the idea that the world works 'like a machine' can be found in ancient Greek thought, predating the early modern philosophy with which it is most closely associated. Her discussion ranges over topics including balancing and equilibrium, lifting water, sphere-making and models of the heavens, and ancient Greek pneumatic theory, with detailed analysis of thinkers such as Aristotle, Archimedes, and Hero of Alexandria. Her book shows scholars of ancient Greek philosophy why it is necessary to pay attention to mechanics, and shows historians of science why the differences between ancient and modern reactions to mechanics are not as great as was generally thought.
Alasdair MacIntyre explores some central philosophical, political and moral claims of modernity and argues that a proper understanding of human goods requires a rejection of these claims. In a ...wide-ranging discussion, he considers how normative and evaluative judgments are to be understood, how desire and practical reasoning are to be characterized, what it is to have adequate self-knowledge, and what part narrative plays in our understanding of human lives. He asks, further, what it would be to understand the modern condition from a neo-Aristotelian or Thomistic perspective, and argues that Thomistic Aristotelianism, informed by Marx's insights, provides us with resources for constructing a contemporary politics and ethics which both enable and require us to act against modernity from within modernity. This rich and important book builds on and advances MacIntyre's thinking in ethics and moral philosophy, and will be of great interest to readers in both fields.
This book explores the question of what it means to be a human being through sustained and original analyses of three important philosophical topics: relativism, skepticism, and naturalism in the ...social sciences. Kevin Cahill’s approach involves an original employment of historical and ethnographic material that is both conceptual and empirical in order to address relevant philosophical issues. Specifically, while Cahill avoids interpretative debates, he develops an approach to philosophical critique based on Cora Diamond’s and James Conant’s work on the early Wittgenstein. This makes possible the use of a concept of culture that avoids the dogmatism that not only typifies traditional metaphysics but also frequently mars arguments from ordinary language or phenomenology. This is especially crucial for the third part of the book, which involves a cultural-historical critique of the ontology of the self in Stanley Cavell’s work on skepticism. In pursuing this strategy, the book also mounts a novel and timely defense of the interpretivist tradition in the philosophy of the social sciences. Towards a Philosophical Anthropology of Culture will be of interest to researchers working on the philosophy of the social sciences, Wittgenstein, and philosophical anthropology.
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