21908
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Ontology can be continual creation, not to know being, but to probe the unknowable [Deleuze]
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Full Idea:
Ontology can be an ontology of difference ....where what is there is not the same old things but a process of continual creation, an ontology that does not seek to reduce being to the knowable, but widens thought to palpate the unknowable.
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From:
Gilles Deleuze (Difference and Repetition [1968]), quoted by Todd May - Gilles Deleuze 5.05
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A reaction:
I'm inclined to think that the first duty of ontology is to face up to the knowable. I'm not sure that probing the unknowable, with no success or prospect of it, is a good way to spend a life. Probing ('palpating') can sometimes discover things.
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21904
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Being is a problem to be engaged, not solved, and needs a new mode of thinking [Deleuze, by May]
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Full Idea:
In Deleuze, Being is not a puzzle to be solved but a problem to be engaged. It is to be engaged by a thought that moves as comfortably among problems as it does among solutions, as fluidly among differences as it does among identities.
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From:
report of Gilles Deleuze (Difference and Repetition [1968]) by Todd May - Gilles Deleuze 4.01
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A reaction:
This sounds like what I've always known as 'negative capability' (thanks to Keats). Is philosophy just a hobby, like playing darts? It seems that the aim of the process is 'liberation', about which I would like to know more.
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19382
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Abstracta are abbreviated ways of talking; there are just substances, and truths about them [Leibniz]
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Full Idea:
I consider abstracta not as real things but as abbreviated ways of talking ...and to that extent I am a nominalist, at least provisionally ...It suffices to posit only substances as real things, and, to assert truths about these.
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From:
Gottfried Leibniz (On the Reality of Accidents [1688]), quoted by Richard T.W. Arthur - Leibniz
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A reaction:
I am a modern nominalist, in my hostility to a serious ontological commitment to abstracta. You get into trouble, though, if you say there are only objects or substances. Physics says reality may all be 'fields', or something.... 'Truths' is good.
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