Metaphysics

Problematic Ideas

The first principle of philosophy is that Universals explain nothing but must themselves be explained.

Deleuze and Guattari – What is Philosophy (p. 7)
Plato and Hume

This brief quote from the introduction to What is Philosophy? encapsulates an important theme that runs throughout not only Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborative works, but also Deleuze’s own works. This should perhaps be obvious if, as the quote makes clear, it is a first principle of philosophy that Universals do not explain but need to be explained. How are we to explain and account for Universals? Are we to offer a nominalist account, bringing into play the writings of David Lewis, among others, to fine tune the argument? We certainly could, and I do touch upon these types of arguments in An Inquiry into Analytic-Continental Metaphysics (forthcoming), where I compare and contrast Lewis’s and D.M. Armstrong’s approaches to understanding, or explaining, the nature of universals. Rather than rehearse those arguments here, however, I want to return to Deleuze, and in particular to two sources of an explanation of universals that Deleuze draws from–namely, Plato and Hume. These two sources come together, I argue, in the concept of problematic Ideas, and it is here where universals come to be explained; or it is to problematic Ideas that we are to turn in acting upon the first principle of philosophy.

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By Jeffrey Bell, ago

Four Problems

In my forthcoming book, An Inquiry into Analytic-Continental Metaphysics: Truth, Relevance, and Reality, I begin with four classic problems in metaphysics. The book unfolds from here, drawing from analytic and continental philosophers along the way, as I develop a metaphysics of problems, inspired by the work of Gilles Deleuze, to address these classic problems in metaphysics. I post the four problems here as a point for possible discussion, and as a basis for blog posts to come.

§1 Problem of the New

What is new, truly new? If we say that some event or phenomenon, A, is truly new, then by what criterion do we make this claim? The most immediate answer appears to be that what is new is unlike anything that preceded it, or there are no phenomena or events prior to A that include or harbor A, for if they did then A would not be truly new but would be simply the explication of what was already implicitly present. The problem of the new may therefore not even be a problem. One could echo the sentiments expressed in the book of Ecclesiastes and resign oneself to the view that ‘what has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun’ (Ecclesiates 1:9 New International Version). If one does accept that there can be something that is truly novel, a reality irreducible to what has preceded it, then we have other problems that come along when one accepts this.

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By Jeffrey Bell, ago

On Garlic and Magnets

garlic-rawHaving recently read Daryn Lehoux’s wonderful book, What Did the Romans Know? (University of Chicago Press, 2012), I was led to revisit and reconsider a post from some time ago on Latour’s concept of factish. The term factish is a neologism Latour uses to combine ideas that are widely thought to be contradictory – namely, a fact and a fetish. The former refers to a reality that is independent of those who may come to discover facts; the latter is a human construction and is a projection onto objects of our desires, wishes, and hopes. Facts thus correspond to a reality that is what it is regardless of what we think about it; fetishes correspond to realities that are what they are solely because of what we think about them. A factish points to a central claim of Latour’s, and it was this claim that was the subject of the earlier post: namely, to be constructed and to be autonomous are synonymous; or, the more constructed the object, the more real and autonomous it is. This gradation of being more or less constructed, or more or less real, is captured by yet another term of Latour’s – relative existence. Lehoux’s book has reminded me of the importance of this theme.

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By Jeffrey Bell, ago