This is the first critical study of The Logic of Sense, Gilles Deleuze's most important work on language and ethics, as well as the main source of his vital philosophy of the event.James Williams explains the originality of Deleuze's work with careful definitions of all his innovative terms and a detailed description of the complex structure he constructs. This reading makes connections to his ground-breaking work on literature, to his critical but also progressive relation to the sciences, and to (...) his controversial denial of the priority of standard logics, human values and 'meaning' in thinking.This book will open new debates and develop current ones around Deleuze's work in philosophy, politics, literature, linguistics, cultural studies and sociology. (shrink)

Former Google advertising strategist, now Oxford-trained philosopher James Williams launches a plea to society and to the tech industry to help ensure that the technology we all carry with us every day does not distract us from pursuing our true goals in life. As information becomes ever more plentiful, the resource that is becoming more scarce is our attention. In this 'attention economy', we need to recognise the fundamental impacts of our new information environment on our lives in order (...) to take back control. Drawing on insights ranging from Diogenes to contemporary tech leaders, Williams's thoughtful and impassioned analysis is sure to provoke discussion and debate. Williams is the inaugural winner of the Nine Dots Prize, a new Prize for creative thinking that tackles contemporary social issues. This title is also available as Open Access. (shrink)

A revised, expanded and fully up-to-date critical introduction to Deleuze's most important work of philosophyBy critically analysing Deleuze's methods, principles and arguments, James Williams helps readers to engage with the revolutionary core of Deleuze's philosophy and take up positions for or against its most innovative and controversial ideas.

'This is an unusually ambitious book... a considerable achievement. It raises important issues, and affords many valuable insights in the course of its historical reflections.' -Maurice Wiles, Journal of Theological Studies 'Every issue and thinker is expounded clearly and concisely, with attention always drawn to strengths as well as weaknesses. To this non-specialist the argument was always accessible and regularly persuasive.' -The Expository TimesCanon and Criterion in Christian Theology provides an original and important narrative on the significance of canon in (...) the Christian tradition. Abraham shows that the move to treat canon as a criterion of truth has had unsuspecting consequences for the history of theology and philosophy, from the Fathers to modern feminist theology. (shrink)

Epicurus, though popularly and indeed nominally associated with a doctrine advocating the procurement of rather expensive pleasure, lived very simply in his garden with a circle of friends. The 14th of his Sovran Maxims or Cardinal Tenets , as collected by Diogenes Laertius, reads: ‘When tolerable security against our fellowmen is attained, then on a basis of power sufficient to afford support and of material prosperity arises in most genuine form the security of a quiet private life withdrawn from the (...) multitude’ R. D. Hicks, the translator, gives, as an alternative to ‘power sufficient to afford support’, ‘power to expel’, but on either reading, we are to think of Epicurus's garden, both the real place and the conceptualized, or tropologized, topos of wisdom and earthly felicity, as enclosed and exclusive. This enclosure, exclusivity, and—what is also implied—abstention of its inmates from participation in the affairs of state are given apophthegmatic expression in ‘Live hidden!’ We contemplate this adage, or slogan, from an enormous cultural distance and, for most of us, ‘Live hidden!’ is much more likely to trigger secondary reflections about the relations between ethics and politics, private and public, perfection of self and improvement of the world, than it is to constitute an actual, or potential, piece of advice we might think about whether , and how , to follow. (shrink)

In 1931, writing in a personal journal, Wittgenstein enumerated the names of those thinkers whom he deemed to have been his most important intellectual influences. He makes the strong claim that these are thinkers whose seminal ideas he has taken over, further elaborated and incorporated into his own work. Here are the names he lists in their order of appearance: Boltzmann, Hertz, Schopenhauer, Frege, Russell, Kraus, Loos, Weininger, Spengler, Sraffa. At the time of the first publication of this list in (...) Culture and Value, those familiar primarily with the most widely read and influential writings on Wittgenstein and his philosophical influences, Norman Malcolm's Memoir and Toulmin and Janik's Wittgenstein's Vienna, would most likely have been surprised by the inclusion of Spengler's name. His is the only one on the list that does not appear in either book. Every other thinker named is not only mentioned as an influence on Wittgenstein in one or the other work, but some of the purported details of that influence are offered. And the appearance of Spengler's name is doubly surprising, given the relatively low esteem in which his work is generally held. Of the others listed, perhaps only Weininger fails to emerge as a respected figure. (shrink)

. . . and I spread it out broader and clearer, and at last it gets almost finished in my head, even when it is a long piece, so that I can see the whole of it at a single glance in my mind, as if it were a beautiful painting of a handsome human being; in which way I do not hear it in my imagination at all as a succession - the way it must come later - but (...) all at once, as it were. (shrink)

An examination of late Rorty shows that he does not abandon belief in an external world about which we can, and indeed must, acquire knowledge. His disapproval of the correspondence theory of truth does not involve the idea that anything other than local weather, for example, could falsify remarks about local weather. It is just that once we get done looking out the window or, if we are outside, feeling the right kind of drops make contact with our skin, there (...) is nothing else we can do, nothing better, to make ourselves more certain, more cognitively secure. One can see this in the detailed work that enables scientific progress. Science improves itself by doing more of the same. G. E. Moore's famous open question stays open only as a reminder that our fallibility never disappears and that our cognitive security is never better than pro tem. Rorty, as a faithful pragmatist and undogmatic meliorist, thinks this is perfectly O.K. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Selected Letters by William, Henry JamesWilliam James EarleWilliam and Henry James. Selected Letters. Edited by Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley. Introduction by John J. McDermott. Charlottesville VA: University Press of Virginia, 1997. Pp. xxxi + 570. $ 39.95.Almost fifty years of letters to and from the very diversely brilliant James brothers: in this volume a generous, and probably ample, selection of 216 (...) from a total of 740 surviving letters or postcards, from an original total, according to the present editors, of twice as many. This volume of correspondence reflects the deep, unquestioned, unshakable familial (and virtually statutory) closeness of William and Henry who happened, as adults, to be seldom in the same place. There is, it must be said, very little explicit philosophy, narrowly or broadly defined, in these letters, but the philosophical reader will—or ought to—find much raw material for philosophical reflection. For example, a reasonable historicist thesis of how brotherhood, or family connection generally, plays itself out is supported by these documents. The nineteenth century is not the same as the twentieth. For example, here is William’s comment on the will of his sister, Alice, who left more to her companion and care-giver, Katherine Loring, a [End Page 479] women of extraordinary virtue and burden, than to her brother Robertson: “I can well sympathize with Alice’s desire to leave her something handsome; but I must say that her own consent (being apparently privy to the will) strikes me as tant soit peu lacking in delicacy. Surely no one of us would like to be in such a position in her family or any other” (271). This would be, in 1998, a rather unenlightened and ungenerous attitude, but is natural enough in 1892, even if not quite inevitable, not being shared by Alice herself. There is, incidentally, much discussion of wills and bequests, for the Jameses were of the genteel class, people with small family money and modest private incomes for whom the wherewithal to maintain homes with servants and to provide themselves with country houses and recuperative European vacations was always a faintly embarrassing, and occasionally a pressing, problem.It is probably also true that the much-discussed question of Henry’s homosexuality has, somehow, to be recast in historically relative terms. Here is an early report—1869—of Henry’s from Oxford: “As I walked along the river I saw hundreds of the mighty lads of England, clad in white flannel & blue, immense, fair-haired, magnificent in their youth, lounging down the stream in their punts or pulling in straining crews & rejoicing in their godlike strength” (41). This could not, the point is, be said by anyone, gay or straight, in 1998. Yet Henry is neither generally naive nor uncritically anglophile. He says of the Warwickshire scenery, which in a way he likes, that it is “too monotonously sweet & smooth—too comfortable, too ovine, too bovine, too English in a word.” And he adds, a little surprisingly: “It seems like a vast show region kept up at the expense of the poor” (41). This is only one of many appealing comments not sparsely scattered, but unpredictably, in letters of more ordinary news. Here’s one I liked occasioned by seeing theater in Paris: “We talk about it & write about it & criticize & dogmatize & analyse to the end of time: but those brave players stand forth & exemplify it & act—create—produce!” (66).Of course the “wit and wisdom” are not the monopoly of Henry. Here is William being wise: “We all learn sooner or later that we must gather ourselves up and more or less arbitrarily concentrate our interests, throw much overboard to save any” (55–56). Again: “It is a sweet world, in the interstices of its bedevilment & brutality” (321). And William being funny: “Boils are surely the most slowly evolving things in nature—Christian doctrine is nothing to them” (393). He is talking about his own boils and was subject, at every period, to ailments and infirmities: “Since writing to you, I have been swimming in deep seas of influenza, gout and Erysipelas of the face” (443). Or as he, in 1900, sums it up: “My... (shrink)

Throughout his career, Deleuze developed a series of original philosophies of time and applied them successfully to many different fields. Now James Williams presents Deleuze's philosophy of time as the central concept that connects his philosophy as a whole. Through this conceptual approach, the book covers all the main periods of Deleuze's philosophy: the early studies of Hume, Nietzsche, Kant, Bergson and Spinoza, the two great philosophical works, Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense, the Capitalism and Schizophrenia works (...) with Guattari, and the late influential studies of literature, film and painting.The result is an important reading of Deleuze and the first full interpretation of his philosophy of time. (shrink)

Do Wittgenstein's late philosophical writings represent a religious point of view? There is a good deal of evidence—including a number of Wittgenstein's own avowals—for an affirmative answer. Against this, there is the stark fact that Wittgenstein's late philosophical writings never directly discuss questions of God and religion. So, if they do represent a religious viewpoint, a correct account of it would, it seems, need to address subtleties and hidden tendencies. While a number of philosophical authors have offered such accounts, nothing (...) resembling a consensus has so far emerged. (shrink)

The Philosophical Forum, Volume 52, Issue 3, Page 263-272, Fall 2021.

What is it to do justice to the absent victims of past injustice, given the distance that separates us from them? Grounded in political theory and guided by the literature on historical justice, W. James Booth restores the dead to their central place at the heart of our understanding of why and how to deal with past injustice. Testimonies and accounts from the race war in the United States, the Holocaust, post-apartheid South Africa, Argentina's Dirty War and the conflict (...) in Northern Ireland help advance and defend Booth's claim that caring for the dead is a central part of addressing past injustice. Memory, Historic Injustice, and Responsibility is an insightful and original book on the relationship of past and present in thinking about what it means to do justice. A valuable addition to the currently available literature on historical justice, the volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of political science, philosophy, history, and law. (shrink)