Abstract
Commenting on the history of philosophy, Bertrand Russell wrote that it is a disappointing fact that after initiating modern philosophy with Descartes, and continuing with Malbranche, philosophy in France became content to imitate what had been begun elsewhere. The philosophical development in France before the Revolution, he claimed, was an outcome of Locke and Newton and afterwards was premised on idealism imported from Germany.1 Following this trend, post ’68 French philosophy leant heavily on German. philosophy and tended to identify the philosophical concept of the subject with a concept of the subject found in (rationalist) German philosophy, specifically Enlightenment philosophy. The Kantian concepts of subjectivity and justified belief were considered to underpin philosophically a more general discourse that was linked to the social or political processes of liberal modernity. Thus through a number of quite complicated philosophical moves humanism, defined in terms of the Cartesian-Kantian conception of subjectivity, was cleaved to modernity.
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Notes
L.P. Gerson, God and Greek Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 144.
‘They liken philosophy to an animal, comparing logic to the bones and sinews, ethics to the flesh, and physics to the soul. Or again to an egg: logic is the outermost part, further in is the ethics, and the inmost part is the physics’. Diogenes Laertius, vii 40 quoted in W. Kneale and M. Kneale, The Development of Logic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), p. 139. Deleuze is fond of this particular metaphor.
J. Sellars, ‘The Point of View of the Cosmos: Deleuze, Romanticism and Stoicism’, Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, vol. 8, 1999, 1–24.
See for example ‘The body without organs is the immanent substance in the most Spinozistic sense of the word; and the partial objects are like its ultimate attributes, which belong to it precisely insofar as they are really distinct and cannot on this account exclude or oppose one another’. G. Deleuze, and F. Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem, H. Lane, 1st pub. 1972 (London: Athlone Press, 1984) p. 327 and
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, 1st pub. 1980 (London: Athlone Press, 1988), p. 153.
See N. Land, ‘Making it with Death: Remarks on Thanatos and Desiring-Production’, in Journal of British Society for Phenomenology, vol. 24 (1993) no. 1, pp. 66–76.
Hardt describes this part of Expressionism in relation to Deleuze’s work on Bergson. ‘Deleuze uses the opening the Ethics as a rereading of Bergson: he presents the proofs of the existence of God and the singularity of substance as an extended meditation on the positive nature of difference and the real foundation of being’. M. Hardt, Gilles Deleuze: an Apprenticeship in Philosophy (London: University College London Press, 1993), p. 60.
K. Jaspers, Spinoza (London: Harvest, 1974), p. 10.
See M. Hooker, ‘The Deductive Character of Spinoza’s Metaphysics’, in R. Kennington ed., The Philosophy of Baruch Spinoza (Washington: Catholic University of America, 1980), p. 25.
See G. Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. R. Hurley, 1st pub. 1970 (San Francisco: City Lights, 1988), p. 61.
A. Matheron, Essence, ‘Existence and Power’, in Ethics 1: The Foundations of Proposition 16, in Y. Yovel, ed., God and Nature. Spinoza’s Metaphysics (Netherlands: E.J. Brill, 1991), p. 24.
See letter 9 to Simon de Vries in A. Wolf ed. The Correspondence of Spinoza (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1928).
J. Bennett, A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 64.
W. Kessler, ‘A Note on Spinoza’s Concept of Attribute’, in M. Mandelbaum, ed., Spinoza: Essays in Interpretation (Illinois: Open Court, 1975), p. 191–4.
R. Cross, Duns Scotus (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 43.
R. Bogue, Deleuze and Guattari (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 67.
Ebert argues that Sextus defined a sign as an antecedent in a conditional of a certain type and tied this to the consequent of the conditional. As a consequence something can be a sign for one person and not another and the interpretation of some phenomenon as sign was written into the very notion of the sign. This might be one way that Deleuze expects to straddle the objectivist and subjectivist divide. T. Ebert, ‘Stoic Theory of Signs in Sextus Empiricus’, in J. Annas, ed., Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, vol. 5 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 86–9.
May reasons that Deleuze offers an interpretation of meaning that invokes the Stoic distinction between bodies and ‘incorporeal entities to construct an interpretation of meaning as an intersection between the effects of words and effects of things’. I fail to see how the notion of lekta helps here as the content of an idea is its bodily modification and this is secured by the parallelism. The theory of affects is separate from this. See T. May, ‘The System and its Fracture: Gilles Deleuze on Otherness’, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, vol. 24, no. 1 (1993), 7.
For an insight into how the thought of ‘intentional inexistence’ connects Aristotle’s Objektiv which is an object of perception and Brentano’s intentional object, see R. Sorabji, ‘From Aristotle to Brentano’, in J. Annas (ed.), Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy: Aristotle and the Later Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 245–8.
Diogenes Vitae VII 64. quoted in B. Mates, Stoic Logic (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1961), p. 17.
A.A. Long, Hellenistic Philosophy: Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics (London: Duckworth, 1986), p. 71.
S. Rosen, The Question of Being: a Reversal of Heidegger (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 69.
J. Heaton, ‘Language Games, Expression and Desire in the work of Deleuze’, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, vol. 24, 1, 1993, 81.
C. Boundas, ‘Deleuze, Serialisation and Subject-Formation’, in C. Boundas and D. Olkowski eds, Deleuze and the Theatre of Philosophy (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), p. 105.
Some might prefer to try this through the philosophy of Meinong. According to Meinong, although mental acts are real they do not always intend real objects but the meaning of the word is always the object that is intended. Real objects are either those which exist or could exist. Other objects include certain complexes and relations. While the former exist and are presented passively to the mind, higher objects are divided into objects which exist and those which merely subsist or obtain. For example, before the mind might be a and b as simple objects and ideas would reflect the real being of these objects (a and b). The formation of a and b into a complex whole (aRb) involves a relation, which itself must be connected to an object R. We now have three entities a, b and R which seem to form a complex whole, a fourth entity, and each idea must intend a simple object (a, b and R). An ‘objective’ is a state of affairs, that is, ‘the election took place without incident’. Not only did this idea raise the problem of the nature of these ‘objectives’ but also seemed to turn all objects into ‘objectives’, that is, ‘judgment that x is the case’. Due to Meinong’s theory of complete and incomplete objects of intention, we find that there is no convincing way to argue that if x (a, b, c, d) and if a, b, c, d, are ‘properties’, and so intend objects which have being, we can apprehend the whole or the singular. And as this was our original problem I consider such avenues to be not worth exploring. For a clear and helpful account of this, see R. Grossman, Meinong (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974).
G. Frege, ‘On Sense and Reference’, in P. Geach and M. Black eds, Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege (Basil Blackwell: Oxford, 1952), p. 57.
C. Thiel, Sense and Reference in Frege’s Logic (Dordrecht-Holland: D. Reidel, 1965), p. 127.
Letter to Husserl, 6 Dec 1906 (VII/4 XIX/6) in G. Frege, Philosophical and Mathematical Correspondence, G. Gabriel, H. Hermes, F. Kambartel, C. Thiel and A. Verart, eds, trans., H. Kaal (Basil Blackwell: Oxford, 1980), p. 70.
H. Sluga, Gottlob Frege (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), p. 145.
‘The method of analytic geometry supplies us with a means of intuitively representing the values of a function for different arguments. If we regard the argument as the numerical value of the abscissa and the corresponding value of the function as the numerical value of the ordinate of a point, we obtain a set of points that presents itself to intuition (in ordinary cases) as a curve. Any point on the curve corresponds to an argument together with the associated value of the function’. G. Frege, ‘Function and Concept’, trans. P. Geach, in B. Mcguinness, ed., Collected Papers on Mathematics, Logic and Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), p. 141.
See G. Currie, Frege: an Introduction to his Philosophy (Brighton: Harverster Wheatsheaf, 1982), p. 86. See also, letter to Husserl, 24 May 1891.
R. Carnap, The Logical Foundations of Probability (Routledge and Kegan Paul: London, 1951), p. 3.
For a discussion of the relationship between objective and logical possibility, see J. Coombs, ‘Created Entities in Seventeenth-Century Scotism’, in The Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 43, 173 (1993) 447–59.
R. Descartes, Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed. Elizabeth Anscombe (Middlesex: Nelsons University Paperbacks, 1970), p. 103.
‘(W)hen we attend to the immense power of this being, we shall be unable to think of its existence as possible without also recognising that it can exist by its own power; and we shall infer from this that this being does really exist and has existed from eternity, since it is quite evident by the natural light that what can exist by its own power always exists. So we shall come to understand that necessary existence is contained in the idea of a supremely powerful being, not by any fiction of the intellect, but because it belongs to the true and immutable nature of such a being that it exists’. R. Descartes, ‘First Set of Replies’, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. II trans. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff and D. Murdoch (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 85.
A. Kenny, Descartes: a Study of His Philosophy (New York: Random House, 1968), p. 162.
M. Wilson, Descartes (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 175–6.
D. Hahm, The Origins of Stoic Cosmobiology (Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1977), p. 137.
G. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. H. Tomlinson 1st pub. 1962 (London: Athlone Press, 1983), p. 186.
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Howie, G. (2002). God. In: Deleuze and Spinoza. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403990204_2
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