John Protevi

Anna Cazzullo, one of the leading young Italian scholars, a student of Carlo Sini, has produced a most useful work on the origins of Western thought on metaphor. Cazzullo begins her La verità della parola with a Borges poem in which the birth of logos, as represented by a conversation between "two Greeks, perhaps Socrates and Parmenides," is accompanied by a suppression of myth and metaphor. This dual gesture, in which philosophy originates through the marginalization of other types of discourse, becomes Cazzullo's guiding thread in her reading of contemporary philosophy of metaphor and its relation to Aristotle. The reader familiar with the work of Heidegger and Derrida will recognize their influence on Cazzullo's thematization of this dual gesture, but will not find much analysis of their texts on metaphor. It is difficult, however, to fault an author for narrowing her task, and Cazzullo's accomplishment is certainly deserving of notice on its own accord.

Sociologists have known for some time of the widespread incidence of prosocial behavior in the aftermath of disasters (research summarized in Rodriguez, Trainor, and Quarantelli 2006). They have also criticized the role of media in spreading “disaster myths” which include the idea of widespread anti-social behavior (Tierney, Bevc, and Kuligowski 2006). In this essay I will investigate the evolutionary theory and neuroscience needed to account for such prosocial behavior, as well as to discuss the political entailments and consequence of media framing emphasizing if not inventing widespread antisocial behavior.

In 2005 Mike Wheeler published a very nice book with MIT entitled Reconstructing the Cognitive World: The Next Step. Wheeler writes about – and is at the forefront of – a group of researchers calling attention to what we can call 4EA cognition: "embodied, embedded, enactive, extended, affective." The philosophical resource for Wheeler’s “next step” is Heidegger. I think it's time we use Deleuze to take another next step.1 I’m going to use Deleuze’s essay on Lucretius as a lead. There, Deleuze writes about naturalism as demystification. For the 4EA schools, the fight is against myths of the subject.

As befits a French philosopher of the 1960s, Gilles Deleuze (1925-995), was famous for his antihumanism and his anti-essentialism. Humans are fully part of nature with no supernatural supplement; and essences are not the way to individuate things. That doesn’t seem to leave much room for a Deleuzean human nature, but that’s what I want to try to explore. I’ll take my clue from what he says in A Thousand Plateaus about nomads, who “reterritorialize on their power of deterritorialization.” In other words, they are most at home when on the move. But this isn’t just spatial movement; we can also say that the habit of nomads is to break habits. I’ll make sense of this claim by referring to Bruce Wexler’s Brain and Culture (MIT, 2006), in particular, his claim that humans evolved for a lengthy childhood period of socially mediated neuroplasticity. Human nature on this view is such that we are individuated by our singular patterns of social – somatic interaction. And this in turn is “nomadic” in Deleuze’s sense: our nature is to be so open to our nurture that it becomes second nature. That is, we’re at home wherever home is. There’s an anti-essentialist nuance here, however. It’s children who are most “nomadic,” most plastic. Most adults drift away from nomadism and become sedentary: they want more of the same. But even here we must nuance things: what if “more of the same” means “more change”? In other words, are there adult “nomads”? I think there are. But we’ll need to discuss Deleuze’s ontology first in order to make sense of these claims. Deleuze is an interactive process philosopher: we aren't substances but processes and those processes are not individuated by properties but as singular patterns of social and somatic interaction. The embodied and the embedded aspects of our being intersect – we are bodies whose capacities form in social interaction. And it's in this intersection of the social and the somatic that subjectivity and selfhood emerge – and are sometimes attenuated and even bypassed..

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

Once one of the most important philosophical concepts (it is impossible to think of Plato without erôs, or Aristotle without philia, or Augustine without caritas and cupiditas), love doesn't get much philosophical notice nowadays, at least outside psychoanalytic circles. Or so it seems. But couldn't one just as well say that Derrida and Deleuze think about nothing but love? What have they written that isn't linked rather directly to desire, to alterity, to getting outside oneself, even if "love" isn't among their..