Andrew Milward

This book-length work combines the priority of vision that we find in Wittgenstein with the priority of concept creation that we find in Deleuze. The result is a method that involves what can be called a non-epistemic philosophy: a philosophy that is not focused on theoretical knowledge but on a creativity that aims towards difference-making, where we create concepts that do not grasp something external to themselves, but create movements within thought and, because we are embodied subjects, potentially within the world. But this does not involve a destruction of knowledge in general; such skeptical destructions can be classified as anti-epistemic forms of philosophy. Instead the book argues for the threefold dimension of the epistemic, anti-epistemic, and non-epistemic to be present within philosophy as a whole.

This work was written for the Midlands Conference of Critical Thought which took place on the 24th and 25th April 2025 at the University of Derby. It concerns the moments in the epics of Homer where the internal appears to be expressed through the external, moments where emotions are visible through the body, where the manner of the thought of individuals is seen in their person alongside their physical appearance. The way that these moments occur suggests the possibility of an implicit unity between the internal and the external. This unity must be distinguished from the modern view where the internal causes the external through physical mechanisms. This difference can be conceptualised in terms of a divergence in the way that thought is understood, in other words in thought’s relation to being. If the modern view sees only a purely causal mechanism, it understands thought as physical being only, where there is no more than an objectivity of thought that remains outside the subjective; if Homer expresses internal thought and the body together, he understands thought in terms of its unity with external being, where the objective body and the subjectivity of the individual are the same.

In the life and work of Marcel Duchamp, there is the combination of the visual and the ideational in works such as The Large Glass, the combination of art and chess within his productive activity, the combination of this productive activity and the ways he made money to live, and the combination of the artwork and the viewer in art’s ongoing developmental movements. These combinations provide a content that can be used to create an understanding of the operation of combination itself. This combination can then be conceptualised through a demarcation of its general features: the layered structural basis of how multiple combinations constitute a combinational whole, and the way in which the purpose of combination becomes the driver of its developmental movements. Another purpose could be to open other terrains of thought for the development of philosophy, allowing a renewed source of momentum through a combinational method.

This essay develops a conceptual structure which is primarily delineated by the extremes of pure opposition and pure non-opposition. The former involves pure denial, destruction, and rejection, while the latter involves pure ignorance, indifference, and affirmation. Both of these extremes can, however, be mitigated by another conceptual element: an ethical demand whose form varies according to the field in which opposition takes place. The essay shows how these extremes along with the mitigating ethical demand can be seen to operate within the four fields of politics, art, philosophy, and the self. On the basis of this, two forms of unity are then described which traverse these fields: the dimension of developmental movement and the dimension of ethics. Finally, the essay outlines a pragmatic of opposition, which concerns the ways that opposition's conceptual structure can be used to bring opposition out of its silence and into speech within the actual circumstances that it occurs.

The Absent World is an essay about the operation of language and thought concerning the gap between sense and referent. Due to variations in the structure of this gap, when we speak or think about the absent world, without the present object to supplement our meaning, unique psychological and ethical dimensions arise as we try to understand a world that surpasses us. As opposed to phenomenology, where the concept of absence structures our understanding of the absent world, this work will posit the actuality of the absent as the basis of another relationship between ourselves and a world that is unseen. This thought of actuality will be developed through an exploration of empathy and a particular thought of death. Then it will be shown how it provides an aspect of a re-imagined concept of depth which, as it refers to a world that overflows any generality, will manipulate the gap between sense and referent in such a way that the usually silent operations of generalisation become not only manifest but pushed towards new extremes. This conceptual movement will be shown to be operative in our understanding of the absent, altering the way a subject’s world can be transformed by its interaction with the unknowns that surpass it.