7 ideas
| 21901 | 'Difference' refers to that which eludes capture [Deleuze, by May] |
| Full Idea: 'Difference' is a term which Deleuze uses to refer to that which eludes capture. | |
| From: report of Gilles Deleuze (Difference and Repetition [1968]) by Todd May - Gilles Deleuze 3.03 | |
| A reaction: Presumably its ancestor is Kant's noumenon. This is one of his concepts used to 'palpate' our ossified conceptual scheme. |
| 21902 | 'Being' is univocal, but its subject matter is actually 'difference' [Deleuze] |
| Full Idea: Being is said in a single and same sense of everything of which it is said, but that of which it is said differs: it is said of difference itself. | |
| From: Gilles Deleuze (Difference and Repetition [1968], p.36), quoted by Todd May - Gilles Deleuze 3.03 | |
| A reaction: This is an attempt to express the Heraclitean view of reality, as process, movement, multiplicity - something which always eludes our attempts to pin it down. |
| 21908 | Ontology can be continual creation, not to know being, but to probe the unknowable [Deleuze] |
| 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. | |
| From: Gilles Deleuze (Difference and Repetition [1968]), quoted by Todd May - Gilles Deleuze 5.05 | |
| 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. |
| 21903 | Ontology does not tell what there is; it is just a strange adventure [Deleuze, by May] |
| Full Idea: In Deleuze's hands ontology is not a matter of telling us what there is, but of taking us on strange adventures. | |
| From: report of Gilles Deleuze (Difference and Repetition [1968]) by Todd May - Gilles Deleuze 3.03 | |
| A reaction: Presumably you only indulge in the strange adventure because you have no idea how to specify what there is. This sounds like the essence of post-modernism, in which life is just a game. |
| 21904 | Being is a problem to be engaged, not solved, and needs a new mode of thinking [Deleuze, by May] |
| 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. | |
| From: report of Gilles Deleuze (Difference and Repetition [1968]) by Todd May - Gilles Deleuze 4.01 | |
| 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. |
| 19699 | A Gettier case is a belief which is true, and its fallible justification involves some luck [Hetherington] |
| Full Idea: A Gettier case contains a belief which is true and well justified without being knowledge. Its justificatory support is also fallible, ...and there is considerable luck in how the belief combnes being true with being justified. | |
| From: Stephen Hetherington (The Gettier Problem [2011], 5) | |
| A reaction: This makes luck the key factor. 'Luck' is a rather vague concept, and so the sort of luck involved must first be spelled out. Or the varieties of luck that can produce this outcome. |
| 14280 | The probability of two events is the first probability times the second probability assuming the first [Bayes] |
| Full Idea: The probability that two events will both happen is the probability of the first [multiplied by] the probability of the second on the supposition that the first happens. | |
| From: Thomas Bayes (Essay on a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances [1763]), quoted by Dorothy Edgington - Conditionals (Stanf) 3.1 |