(Deleuze and) Interology

2014

This groundbreaking book engages with the relationship between ontology, metaphysics, and epistemology in Heidegger and Deleuze. Showing that the latter are rooted in their respective ontologies not only provides a clear, detailed, and holistic outline of all three, but also reveals that Heidegger and Deleuze are highly critical of thinking that associates being with identity. While they both seek to overcome this association by affirming being as becoming, they differ in terms of what this becoming entails with Deleuze's onto-genetic account of being's rhizomic-becoming going beyond Heidegger's temporal account. However, while Deleuze attempts to think as and from difference, the relationship between identity and difference is explored to offer a tri-partite account of identity that shows that, despite his claims to the contrary, Deleuze's ontological categories continue to depend on a form of the identity he aims to overcome.

This essay suggests loosening pedagogical boundaries in order to prepare children for useful philosophical reflection, particularly ontological boundaries. The argument for this is that the analytic-continental distinction is muddier than most realize. I explain analytical developments in logic from 1884 to 1931 in a way designed to show there should be no real distinction between analytic and Continental philosophy. I suggest this explanation provides sufficient support for dismissing ontological boundaries in certain philosophical contexts as well as in early philosophical education.

Deleuze, Guattari and India: Exploring a Post-Postcolonial Multiplicity , 2022

This paper examines the ontological structure of Deleuze’s philosophy in a comprehensive manner.

2020

Recent movements in philosophy, including so-called new materialisms and speculative realisms, are united by a renewed interest in the problem of ontology. These movements seek in diverse ways to escape a perceived philosophical anthropocentrism-of post-Kantian philosophy in general, and of twentieth-century phenomenological traditions in particular-and to restore to philosophy a capacity to think the real. However, we show that similar concerns were already operative in two landmark texts within the twentieth century post-phenomenological tradition: Maurice Merleau-Ponty's The Visible and The Invisible, and Gilles Deleuze's Difference & Repetition. Both philosophers, writing less than a decade apart, expressed a now-familiar frustration with the limitations of the phenomenological method. These thinkers instead developed radically original philosophical methods and concepts which are still not widely understood, but which we think invaluable to anyone interested in speculative philosophy or metaphysics today. We thus offer an exposition of both works, with an emphasis on precisely how each thinker breaks from the doctrine of the transcendental subject, giving genuine ontological status to a being-as-abyss which we situate at the very heart of each text. We will see the subsequent, transformative effect of this break on their respective conceptions of thought, being, meaning, and time. In this way, we will uncover an abundance of novel and radical philosophical resources which will both contribute to these thinkers' respective scholarships, as well as contextualise and advance broader, ongoing debates about the nature, powers and limitations of philosophy itself.

America Critica, 2020

The investigation of the self, of what exists, and of the ontological properties of the cosmos is nothing new in the history of anthropology. In the last two decades, however, the discipline has undertaken an "ontological turn." This perspective focuses on how different societies define the entities that inhabit the world and the relationships between them. The ontological turn is built upon the critiques of the Great Divide (nature/culture), and on Western naturalism as the modern dominant ontology. It is also a reaction to the linguistic turn that began to dominate in the 1980s. In this paper we present the most salient traditions of the ontological turn (the English, French, and North American), highlighting differences and similarities between them.-Ontological turn, political ontology, recursive anthropology, nature/culture. Abstract-La investigación sobre el yo, acerca de lo que existe y sobre las propiedades ontológicas del cosmos no es algo nuevo en la historia de la antropología. Sin embargo, en las últimas dos décadas, la disciplina ha emprendido lo que ha venido a llamarse como "giro ontológico". Esta perspectiva se centra en cómo las diferentes sociedades definen las entidades que habitan el mundo y las relaciones entre ellas. El giro ontológico se basa en las críticas a la Gran División (naturaleza/cultura) y al naturalismo occidental como ontología moderna dominante. También es una reacción al giro lingüístico que comenzó a dominar en la década de 1980. En este documento presentamos las tradiciones más destacadas del giro ontológico (la inglesa, la francesa y la norteamericana), destacando las diferencias y similitudes entre ellas.-Giro ontológico, ontología política, antropología recursiva, naturaleza/cultura.

Understood as the ways of making the world real, the ontological, in the recent turn to ontology, involves the critique and transformation of modern ontological presuppositions, stories, and practices that make the boundaries and differences that constitute who we are and how we live in the modern world order. The recognition of multiple ontologies, within and beyond the modern ontological enclosures of being, involves the affirmation of the plurality of different world realities, captured as civilizations, problematically so within current cultures of scholarship. The ontological critique of modernity and the opening toward the pluriverse of multiple ways of being call for re-imagining education beyond the cosmology of modern Western civilization. The ontological turn, associated with post-constructionism, is an emergent conjunction of diverse, partly contradictory but interrelated intellectual and political movements that share a common concern for how different worlds are enacted in processes, practices and stories. The ontological turn names a shift beyond objectivism and social constructionism in the ways we can theorize what is considered real and how we come to know worlds as real (Escobar, 2017). Ontologies are defined as ways of enacting worlds through lived stories and assumptions about the kinds of things that exist and their interrelations that enable world, self, other sense making (Blaser, 2009, 2010). Re-conceptualized as relational ways of making the world real (world-making practices), the ontological realm becomes part of the new background horizon for rethinking who we are and how we belong. The recent rethinking of ontology across the sciences and humanities reflects in part, the crisis of the singular ontology of modernity, expressed in polarized conflicts of identity and belonging in the United States today. Ontologically speaking, crises of matter are crises of thought, as both occur within interdependent ecologies of matter and thought. This symposium addresses the emancipatory possibilities of the recent turn toward ontology beyond the occlusions of modernity while exploring four strands comprising this turn: Black ontology, anthropological ontology, relational ontologies, and political ontology. Two purposes are: 1) introduce and compare different critical uses of ontology and 2) seek relations of connection and mutual support.

All ontology has to do with fundamental assertions about being as such. Assertions of this sort are precisely what we call categories of being. Like the Kantian categories -which, as far as content is concerned, are also precisely this: fundamental assertions about being -they have the character of universal constitutive principles comprising all more specialized ontological assertions. Hence, the new ontology might be expected to provide a transcendental deduction also of these ontological assertions. Otherwise, it is argued, it could not guarantee their objective validity. That, however, would mean that this ontology in its turn was in need of an epistemological foundation which would have to provide the justification of a priori principles of an even wider scope. Thereby a way for ontology is traced, and this way once more follows the scheme of the old deductivity. But it is here that the roads of the old and the new ontology part. Just as in regard to the problem, of being it is today no longer a question of substantial forms and of the teleological determination of actual processes by these forms, so also the problem at issue is no longer that of a post factum justification of a priori principles. The categories with which the new ontology deals are won neither by a definition of the universal nor through derivation from a formal table of judgments. They are rather gleaned step by step from an observation of existing realities. And since, of course, this method of their discovery does not allow for an absolute criterion of truth, here no more than in any other field of knowledge, it must be added that the procedure of finding and rechecking is a laborious and cumbersome one. Under the limited conditions of human research it requires manifold detours, demands constant corrections, and, like all genuine scholarly work, never comes to an end. Here one may truly and literally speak of new ways of ontology. The basic thesis can possibly be formulated like this: The categories of being are not a priori principles. Only such things as insights, cognitions, and judgments can be a priori. In fact the whole contrast between a priori and a posteriori is only an epistemological one. But ontology is not concerned with knowledge, much less with mere judgments, but with the object of knowledge in so far as this object is at the same time "transobjective," that is, independent of whether or to what extent being is actually transformed into an object of knowledge. The principles of the object in its very being are in no way eo ipso also cognitive principles. In some fields they can be quite heterogeneous, as the manifold admixtures of the unknowable in nearly all basic problems of philosophy amply prove. From this alone it follows that the principles of being cannot be a priori principles of our intellect, that they, as a matter of fact, are just as indifferent to the dividing line between the knowable and the unknowable as the being whose principles they are." From: Nicolai Hartmann -New ways of Ontology (1949) Translated by Reinhard C. Kuhn -Chicago, Henry Regnery Company, 1953 pp. 13-14 "The true characteristics of reality do not depend on the categories of space and matter but on those of time and individuality. Ontologically considered, time and space are not categories of equal worth: Time is by far more fundamental than space. Only material things and living beings, including the processes through which their existence flows, are spatial. But spiritual and psychic processes, as well as material processes, are temporal. For everything real is in time and only a part of it in space --we might say, only one half of the real world, its lower forms. Inseparably joined with temporality is individuality. This consists in nothing but singleness and uniqueness. The real is perishable and thereby also unrepeatable. The same sort of thing recurs, never the same identical thing. This holds true of historical events as well as of cosmic motions, of persons as well as of things. Only the universal recurs, for, considered by itself, it is timeless, always existing, eternal. This timelessness was once considered in the old ontology to be a being of a higher order, indeed, even the only true being. But, in truth, it is rather a dependent, a merely ideal being, and the universal has reality nowhere else but in the real particulars which are both temporal and individual. What once was considered a kingdom of perfection, the kingdom of essences, whose faint copies things were supposed to be, has proved itself to be a kingdom of incomplete being which becomes independent only through abstraction. In the recognition of this lies perhaps the most striking contrast of the new ontology to the old. That is why the new ontology can very well grapple with the deep problems of German idealism, why it can deal with the spirit and freedom, social life and history, just as well as with the cosmos and the organism. Hence new light may be expected to be shed by it on the characteristic situation and activity of man as a spiritual being within a non-spiritual, law-determined world. These reflections are but a small section from a chapter on categorial analysis. Here they are only sketched. They justly demand a much more exact discussion of space, time, process, psychic act, reality, and so forth. Particularly reality, the pure mode of being of the structures and processes which form the world, is a very difficult subject for analysis. In order to understand reality the philosopher must start with an examination of the relationship of possibility and actuality --for centuries the fundamental problem of ontology. And the revolution in the whole problem of being extends even to these very foundations of being. For what the old ontology teaches about potency and act --a relationship according to which everything real is a realization of a pre-existing disposition and all being is destined to become what it is by disposition --proves to be far from adequate in view of the broadened problem of reality. It is incumbent upon us to introduce a new concept of 'real possibility' (Realmöglichkeit) which no longer coincides with essential possibility but which signifies the efinitions of Ontology.

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2013

Professor Sir Geoffrey Lloyd's Being, humanity and understanding (2012) offers anthropologists a salutary commentary from the vantage of history and philosophy upon what is arguably our discipline's defining-project-how to apprehend and assess cultural difference, on the one hand, while sustaining a long-standing inquiry into humankind's essential psychic unity, on the other. 1 Lloyd's enviable erudition, especially with respect to ancient Greek and Chinese philosophy, enlivens anthropology's abiding interest in these issues. Moreover, Lloyd's observations are especially timely given a recent and, perhaps, growing trend among some anthropologists to approach culture in terms of variant, sui generis ontologies 2 Lloyd is especially interested in the provocative implications of perspectivism (epitomized by the works of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro [1998])] and animism (as articulated by Philippe Descola [2013]), 3 but he also engages earlier ethno-

UT MA (Asian Studies) Course Paper (RS 383M), 2021

The Ontological Turn (TOT) is a movement that began in the 90s to start considering ontology more than epistemology. Its members share the core desire to understand and—as the often say—“take seriously" the Other. From what I have been able to gather there are essentially: two kinds of Others that TOT has addressed (the non-human and the non-western); two disciplines it has drawn from (Philosophy and Anthropology); and finally two forms of the movement's seriousness (what I will call "hard" and "soft", the first is a metaphysics the later a method). Often these things are mixed. For example, Holbraad's original Anthropological work in 2007 asked "hard" ontological questions about non-western and non-human objects. In 2017 Holbraad took a more "soft" position and also considered western Christians. Over the next few pages I will do my best to lay out a summary of: the movement, Holbraad's place in it, its predecessors in our readings (Phenomenology and William James), and finally its implications for the discipline.