PLURALIST FLEXI-ONTOLOGY Deleuze, Lyotard, Serres, Feyerabend

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

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

Lampejo: Revista Eletrônica de Filosofia e Cultura, 2016

The book is a comprehensive synthesis of the results of the research work that the author has been conducting over more than two decades. Above all, 'Deleuze: History and Science' provides a balance of a mature theoretical reflection. Scrutinizing Deleuze’s philosophy, but also knowingly crossing different sciences, from mathematics to linguistics, from chemistry to astrophysics, from to biology to sociology, to psychology, politics, history, economics, urbanism, and so on, De Landa proposes a new account of metaphysics, a materialist one, whose fundamental notion is assemblage (Deleuze & Guattari’s 'agencement' in French). However, the argumentation style is closer from the analytic tradition than from the mainstream post-structuralist literature. This certainly makes it possible to reconstruct Deleuze’s ideas in a surprisingly clear and consistent way. But, that is also the question: isn’t it all too clear for Deleuze?

Foucault Studies, 2014

This following essay explores the meaning and implications of philosophical critique and creativity within the work of Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault. The two philosophers’ appeals to ontology, as an important site upon which their ethico-political commitments to critique and creativity simultaneously converge and diverge, frame this exploration. The first part of the essay shows how Deleuze’s and Foucault’s respective ontologies further critique and creativity. The second part of the essay focuses on a point of divergence in the two thinkers’ appeals to ontology: the relationship between philosophy and history. From a Foucauldian perspective, the ahistorical character of Deleuze’s ontology of difference threatens to undermine its transformative potential, whereas from a Deleuzian perspective, the historical character of Foucault’s ontology of the present, while it may not undermine transformation, certainly does not facilitate it. In conclusion, I argue that it is precisel...

European Journal of Analytic Philosophy, 2023

Ontological pluralism is the view that there are different ways of being. Historically, ways of being are aligned with the ontological categories. This paper is about to investigate why there is such a connection, and how it should be understood. Ontological pluralism suffers from an objection, according to which ontological pluralism collapses into ontological monism, i.e., there is only one way to be. Admitting to ontological categories can save ontological pluralism from this objection if ways of being ground ontological categories.

In recent years, a hierarchical view of reality has become extremely influential. In order to understand the world as a whole, on this view, we need to understand the nature of the fundamental constituents of the world. We also need to understand the relations that build the world up from these fundamental constituents. Building pluralism is the view that there are at least two equally fundamental relations that together build the world. It has been widely, though tacitly, assumed in a variety of important metaphysical debates. However, my primary aim in this paper is to argue that this has been a mistake. I will show that serious problems concerning the relationship between building and fundamentality afflict pluralism and are likely fatal to it. I claim that, for better or worse, our best hope is building singularism, the view that there is a single most fundamental building relation. I conclude by examining the advantage that singularist accounts enjoy over their pluralist rivals.

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.

The two ontological pluralisms of French anthropology Descola, Philippe. Beyond nature and culture. xxii, 463 pp., figs, illus., bibliogr. Chicago: Univ. Press, 2013. £45.50 (cloth) Latour, Bruno. An inquiry into modes of existence: an anthropology of the moderns. xxvii, 486 pp. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2013. £29.95 (cloth) bs_bs_banner

Logica Universalis, 2010

This paper addresses questions of universality related to ontological engineering, namely aims at substantiating (negative) answers to the following three basic questions: (i) Is there a 'universal ontology' ?, (ii) Is there a 'universal formal ontology language' ?, and (iii) Is there a universally applicable 'mode of reasoning' for formal ontologies? To support our answers in a principled way, we present a general framework for the design of formal ontologies resting on two main principles: firstly, we endorse Rudolf Carnap's principle of logical tolerance by giving central stage to the concept of logical heterogeneity, i.e. the use of a plurality of logical languages within one ontology design. Secondly, to structure and combine heterogeneous ontologies in a semantically wellfounded way, we base our work on abstract model theory in the form of institutional semantics, as forcefully put forward by Joseph Goguen and Rod Burstall. In particular, we employ the structuring mechanisms of the heterogeneous algebraic specification language HetCasl for defining a general concept of heterogeneous, distributed, highly modular and structured ontologies, called hyperontologies. Moreover, we distinguish, on a structural and semantic level, several different kinds of combining and aligning heterogeneous ontologies, namely integration, connection, and refinement. We show how the notion of heterogeneous refinement can be used to provide both a general notion of sub-ontology as well as a notion of heterogeneous equivalence of ontologies, and finally sketch how different modes of reasoning over ontologies are related to these different structuring aspects.

"Ontologien der Moderne", John, René; Rückert-John, Jana; Esposito, Elena (Hrsg.), Springer VS Verlag 2013.

In the following article the question I try to find an answer to is: how can one reasonably speak about the plurality of ontologies? Roughly speaking: is everyone who busies oneself with the plurality of ontologies a philosophical risk-taker? Moreover, is there any way of understanding their theory in a convincing manner? Anticipating further considerations, the aim of the following reflections is to defend the rationality of the concept of the plurality of ontologies. With this end in view I discuss two philosophical theories thateach in its own wayare concerned with this issue: 1.) the theory of multiplicity of realities by Leon Chwistek and 2.) the philosophy of symbolic forms of Ernst Cassirer. Both illustrate very well the need of the epistemological understanding of the aforementioned plurality.

Considerable attention has recently been directed towards the analysis of pluralism in social science, not least in economics. Plurality is often taken as a mark of pluralism. But it is not the same thing, and often indicates little more than a disconnected fragmentation of contributions to a topic. We believe, in fact, that such fragmentation is rife in modern social theorising, and identify numerous causes. We subsequently examine the possibility of using an ontologically reflexive form of pluralism to achieve a greater degree of theoretical integration between various strands of thought than has hitherto been the case. We conclude by stressing the need to be aware of ontological presuppositions in social theorising. Our motivation is a concern with advancing a ‘the pluralist project’ in which, where feasible, an integration of ideas takes centre stage.