Jeffrey Bell

This essay attempts to bring together the philosophies of Spinoza, Wittgenstein, and Deleuze by developing an ethics of learning that is implicit, and at times explicit, in each of their works. How this comes to be manifest in their works is that for Spinoza, Wittgenstein, and Deleuze, what is most important about this ethics of learning is that it is irreducible to rigid moral laws and to an understanding of reality that is reducible to forms of representational thinking. Most importantly, this essay shows that Spinoza’s understanding of absolutely infinite substance allows Spinoza to develop the ethical project of his Ethics—namely, his ethics of learning—and it is also what helps us to understand what Wittgenstein believed must be passed over in silence. Although the influence of Spinoza on Deleuze is well known, the focus placed here on learning will highlight, and in large part explain, why Spinoza remains a constant thread throughout Deleuze’s work while the importance of other philosophers, such as Nietzsche, slip to the background.

This forward-thinking collection presents new work that looks beyond the division between the analytic and continental philosophical traditions—one that has long caused dissension, mutual distrust, and institutional barriers to the development of common concerns and problems. Rather than rehearsing the causes of the divide, contributors draw upon the problems, methods, and results of both traditions to show what post-divide philosophical work looks like in practice. Ranging from metaphysics and philosophy of mind to political philosophy and ethics, the papers gathered here bring into mutual dialogue a wide range of recent and contemporary thinkers, and confront leading problems common to both traditions, including methodology, ontology, meaning, truth, values, and personhood. Collectively, these essays show that it is already possible to foresee a future for philosophical thought and practice no longer determined neither as "analytic" nor as "continental," but, instead, as a pluralistic synthesis of what is best in both traditions. The new work assembled here shows how the problems, projects, and ambitions of twentieth-century philosophy are already being taken up and productively transformed to produce new insights, questions, and methods for philosophy today.

This is an invited book symposium submission (invited by Mary Beth Mader). In these comments I summarize the strengths of Ford's recent book on Deleuze's work on Hume. I argue that while Ford has contributed an important book to both the scholarship on Deleuze's early work and on the intellectual history of mid‐twentieth century French philosophy, there are a few issues I seek to flesh out in these comments that are nonetheless in the spirit of Ford's overall project. In particular, I show how Deleuze offers a unique reading of Hume that ought to be taken more seriously by Hume scholars—a point Ford does not stress—and I argue that in addition to the influence of Jean Wahl, which Ford details superbly, the work of Sartre is also critical to understanding Deleuze's early philosophical writings.

Gilles Deleuze was one of the most influential philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century. As with other French philosophers of his generation, such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, Deleuze's work and his collaboration with Félix Guattari has also had huge influence in other disciplines, particularly literature, film studies, architecture and science and mathematics. The Deleuzian Mind is an outstanding collection which explores the full extent and significance of Deleuze's work, its reception and its legacy. Comprising thirty-eight chapters written by an international and interdisciplinary team of contributors, the volume is divided into eight clear parts: Situating Deleuze A New History of Philosophy. Deleuze's Precursors Encounters Critical and Clinical The Early Philosophy. A Logic of Sense The Later Philosophy. The Wasp and the Orchid Art and Literature Deleuze, Maths and Science Deleuze and Politics. With its wide-ranging exploration of Deleuze's thought and the huge influence it continues to have within the theoretical humanities and social sciences, The Deleuzian Mind is invaluable reading for students, researchers and scholars in philosophy, literature, film studies and political theory.

The primary task of my dissertation is to clarify the relationship between phenomenology and poststructuralism. In doing this, I analyze the role of paradox in both traditions. I show, for example, that Merleau-Ponty's arguments for the paradoxical nature of perception are to be seen as a continuation of Husserl's fundamental project, a project I claim is itself implicitly motivated by an effort to account for paradox. Merleau-Ponty thus makes explicit what was already implicitly at work within Husserl's thought. ;Meleau-Ponty argues, in short, that to account for the difference between self and other requires recognizing the paradoxical unity of self and other that is the condition for this difference. Furthermore, although Husserl argues for a paradoxical unity of self and other, it is a non-corporeal unity--i.e., a self-constituting consciousness, whereas Merleau-Ponty claims this paradoxical unity is corporeal, i.e., it is the perceiving body. It is this move which Merleau-Ponty believes resolves the problems he sees in Husserl's account of the other. ;As I turn to the poststructuralist tradition, my focus is primarily on the work of Deleuze. I show that there is a fundamental difference between Deleuze and phenomenology's understanding of paradox. This difference reflects phenomenology's adherence to traditional transcendental philosophy. In essence, Deleuze feels that neither Husserl nor Merleau-Ponty adequately address the role of paradox because they each claim it is conditioned by the identity of something more fundamental: i.e., the transcendental ego for Husserl, the body or Being for Merleau-Ponty. Deleuze, however, argues that the fundamental transcendental condition is paradox itself, and it is this move which characterizes the contrast between Deleuze's transcendental philosophy of difference and Husserl and Merleau-Ponty's transcendental philosophy of identity. ;In addition to these discussions, I on several occasions refer to the work that has been done in the analytic tradition. While being sensitive to the differences between the analytic and continental traditions, I reveal points of contact or overlap, and hence I attempt to lay the groundwork for the possibility of future dialogues.

Despite the fact that time, evolution, becoming and genealogy are central concepts in Deleuze's work, there has been no sustained study of his philosophy in relation to the question of history. This book aims to open up Deleuze's relevance to those working in history, the history of ideas, science studies, evolutionary psychology, history of philosophy and interdisciplinary projects inflected by historical problems.The essays in this volume cover all aspects of Deleuze's philosophy and its relation to history, ranging from the application of Deleuze's philosophy to historical method, Deleuze's own use of the history of philosophy, his interpretations of other historical thinkers and the complex theories of time and evolution in his work.Contributors include: Paul Patton, Manuel DeLanda, John Protevi, Ian Buchanan, Tim Flanagan, James Williams, Eve Bischoff, Jay Lampert.

ABSTRACT In this article I extend Gilles Deleuze’s understanding of sense, as developed in Logic of Sense, by developing a metaphysics of problems. In doing this, we can appreciate the role Hume’s philosophy plays in Deleuze’s thought, and most importantly how we can understand sense in the context of making sense of life. With this perspective in place, we compare Deleuze’s project with Pierre Bourdieu’s and, finally, apply the notion of making sense to the history of the emergence of capitalism. With this discussion of the history of capitalism, we see how Deleuze draws from both Hume and Marx, or, in short, we sketch a Deleuzo-Humean political theory.

This book offers the first extended comparison of the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and David Hume. Jeffrey Bell argues that Deleuze's early work on Hume was instrumental to Deleuze's formulation of the problems and concepts that would remain the focus of his entire corpus. Reading Deleuze's work in light of Hume's influence, along with a comparison of Deleuze's work with William James, Henri Bergson, and others, sets the stage for a vigorous defence of his philosophy against a number of recent criticisms. It also extends the field of Deleuze studies by showing how Deleuze's thought can clarify and contribute to the work being done in political theory, cultural studies and history, particularly the history of the Scottish Enlightenment. By engaging Deleuze's thought with the work of Hume, this book clarifies and supports the work of Deleuze and exemplifies the continuing relevance of Hume's thought to a number of contemporary debates.

From the early 1960s until his death, French philosopher Gilles Deleuze wrote many influential works on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. One of Deleuze's main philosophical projects was a systematic inversion of the traditional relationship between identity and difference. This Deleuzian philosophy of difference is the subject of Jeffrey A. Bell's Philosophy at the Edge of Chaos. Bell argues that Deleuze's efforts to develop a philosophy of difference are best understood by exploring both Deleuze's claim to be a Spinozist, and Nietzsche's claim to have found in Spinoza an important precursor. Beginning with an analysis of these claims, Bell shows how Deleuze extends and transforms concepts at work in Spinoza and Nietzsche to produce a philosophy of difference that promotes and, in fact, exemplifies the notions of dynamic systems and complexity theory. With these concepts at work, Deleuze constructs a philosophical approach that avoids many of the difficulties that linger in other attempts to think about difference. Bell uses close readings of Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, and Whitehead to illustrate how Deleuze's philosophy is successful in this regard and to demonstrate the importance of the historical tradition for Deleuze. Far from being a philosopher who turns his back on what is taken to be a mistaken metaphysical tradition, Bell argues that Deleuze is best understood as a thinker who endeavoured to continue the work of traditional metaphysics and philosophy.

"This volume brings together a team of international specialists on Deleuze and Guattari to provide in-depth critical studies of each plateau of their major work, A Thousand Plateaus. It combines an overview of the text with deep scholarship and brings a renewed focus on the philosophical significance of their project.'A Thousand Plateaus' represents a whole new way of doing philosophy. This collection supports the critical reception of Deleuze and Guattari's text as one of the most important and influential works of modern theory. Key Features : emphasises the philosophical nature of A Thousand Plateaus, provides detailed coverage of the text as a whole, brings together cutting edge research from some of the leading lights in scholarship on Deleuze and Guattari, an ideal companion to a plateau-by-plateau reading of Deleuze and Guattari's work."--Back cover.

In this article, we address the problem of predication, or the problem of connecting conceptual predicates to the sets of properties and attributes that correspond to these predicates. We take as our starting point Mark Wilson’s work, especially “Predicate meets Property,” and add to it a metaphysics of problems that one finds in the work of Gilles Deleuze. This enables us to understand the relationship between a predicate and the set of properties in terms of the relationship between a solution to a problem. The advantage of this approach is that it helps to illuminate the key issues involved in contemporary work on human reasoning. We sketch some of these advantages by looking to recent work on literacy and how literacy affects the capacity to engage in formal reasoning.

This forward-thinking collection presents new work that looks beyond the division between the analytic and continental philosophical traditions—one that has long caused dissension, mutual distrust, and institutional barriers to the development of common concerns and problems. Rather than rehearsing the causes of the divide, contributors draw upon the problems, methods, and results of both traditions to show what post-divide philosophical work looks like in practice. Ranging from metaphysics and philosophy of mind to political philosophy and ethics, the papers gathered here bring into mutual dialogue a wide range of recent and contemporary thinkers, and confront leading problems common to both traditions, including methodology, ontology, meaning, truth, values, and personhood. Collectively, these essays show that it is already possible to foresee a future for philosophical thought and practice no longer determined neither as "analytic" nor as "continental," but, instead, as a pluralistic synthesis of what is best in both traditions. The new work assembled here shows how the problems, projects, and ambitions of twentieth-century philosophy are already being taken up and productively transformed to produce new insights, questions, and methods for philosophy today.

For those familiar with the work of Deleuze, and Deleuze and Guattari, it might at first seem unwise to pursue a Deleuze and Guattarian philosophy of history. After all, is it not Deleuze who, in an interview with Antonio Negri, argues that ‘What history grasps in an event is the way it’s actualized in particular circumstances; the event's becoming is beyond the scope of history'? (Deleuze 1995: 170). And more damningly, Deleuze adds, ‘History isn’t experimental, it's just the set of more or less negative preconditions that make it possible to experiment with something beyond history' (Deleuze 1995: 170). History, in short, is a starting point for experimental work, but it is precisely history ‘that one leaves behind in order to “become,” that is, to create something new’ (1995: 171). Similarly in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari argue that ‘History is made by those who oppose history (not by those who insert themselves into it, or even reshape it)’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 295). In the very first line of his book, Lampert recognizes the possible conclusion these citations might lead one to, namely, ‘Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of becoming seems at times opposed to the very idea of historical succession' (1); and yet, as Lampert adeptly demonstrates, it would be a mistake to conclude that opposing history to ‘create something new’, ‘something beyond history’, necessarily entails being hostile to history, to the ‘idea of historical succession’, and thus to a philosophy of history.

This essay responds to Badiou's charge that Deleuze fails to set forth a philosophy that is “beyond Gategorical oppositions.” It is argued that this criticism of Deleuze is founded upon a misreading of the Deleuzean distinction between the virtual and the actual, a reading that carries forward Badiou's misreading of Spinoza and, hence, of Deleuze's Spinozism. With this corrected, we show how the virtual‐actual distinction operates within the experimental philosophy, or pragmatics, that Deleuze, and later Deleuze and Guattari, sets forth. It is this pragmatics that is precisely the philosophy of difference that is beyond categorical oppositions. Through a comparison of Deleuzean pragmatics with the work of Hume and Peirce, we are able to respond to Badiou's further criticism that Deleuze's philosophy fails to understand the conditions for creativity in thought and culture. This criticism is itself resolved once one corrects for Badiou's misreading of Deleuze's virtual‐actual distinction.