In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari critique the relationship between formal logic and philosophy. They argue that since philosophy is the creation of concepts that are intensional, and formal logic reduces concepts to their extension, formal logic then has no special providence to decide philosophical questions. This may strike the logic-inclined philosopher as outdated given that there are now formal intensional logics designed to model meaning rather than reference. However, it will be shown that these logics too fail to (...) express the concept in a way that preserves its philosophical import. Doing so requires contrasting Deleuze and Guattari's account of the concept with Frege's to show how the latter persists even in intensional logics in the form of mathematical functions that are ultimately referential. This then results in support for Deleuze and Guattari's claim that formal logic is a useful tool, but that it is incapable of adjudicating philosophical disputes. (shrink)

While Continental thought has no shortage of criticism and diagnosis of social, political, and ethical issues, it tends to avoid offering guidance on what to do about such issues. In Reconsidering the Life of Power, Garrison argues for a radical new alternative for the Continental tradition: it ought to stage an encounter with the Confucian tradition. This is because, he argues, both traditions have at the center of their political thought a focus on the social formation of subjects, that is, (...) the process of subjectivation. While Continental thought often takes this process to empty the subject of all but nominal forms of autonomy, the Confucian tradition sees subjectivation as the very source of real human autonomy. This paper explores one such possible encounter by synthesizing Deleuze’s account of individuation with the constructivist reading of Xunzi’s view that artifice is the source of human autonomy and virtue. Ultimately, I argue that coupling Deleuze’s defense of the possibility of the New with Xunzi’s transformational account of human nature provides an understanding of subjectivation that is optimistic about the shaping of human autonomy as well as practical guidance for how to do so. (shrink)

The question of the metaphysical status of the laws of physics has received increased attention in recent years. Perhaps most well-known among this work are David Lewis’s Humean supervenience and Nancy Cartwright’s dispositionalism, both of which reject the classical conception of the laws of physics as necessary and real independent of the objects they govern, arguing instead that what we call laws are shorthand for the regularities of local states of affairs or the dispositions of objects. The properties of necessity (...) and reality are generally taken to go hand-in-hand when physical laws are concerned; however, this leaves aside the possibility that the laws of physics are independently real yet contingent. This paper will explore this third option which is found in the work of Quentin Meillassoux. We will ask: if laws both exist independent of their objects and are contingent, what happens when laws change? Specifically, the possibility of metaphysical retro-causation becomes a live option. This raises both questions of the ontological status of the past as well as our epistemic access to the past after a change in physical laws. Meillassoux’s ontology of hyper-chaos weathers this challenge with its consistency intact; however, it is an open question of whether or not saving the reality of physical laws by sacrificing their necessity is worth the epistemic limits and metaphysical strangeness that it implies. (shrink)

Chiurazzi launches a new salvo into the debate over the fundamentality of modality, and, fascinatingly, he does so by using the enemy's artillery. Though Chiurazzi's response is recognizably within...