Deleuze: History and Science

by Manuel DeLanda, Wolfgang Schirmacher (Editor)

This is a collection of essays, most published here for the first time, on Gilles Deleuze's ideas about history and science. Its focus is on ontological or metaphysical What are the legitimate social entities that can be used in historical explanations, given a materialist metaphysics? What are the legitimate inhabitants of the material world, natural and artificial, and what role should science play in determining their legitimacy? What can philosophy contribute to this enterprise? --- Manuel DeLanda is the author of five philosophy books, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (1991), A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (1997), Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (2002), A New Philosophy of Society (2006), and The Emergence of Synthetic Reason (Forthcoming). He teaches two seminars at University of Pennsylvania, Department of "Philosophy of Theories of Self-Organization and Urban Dynamics", and "Philosophy of Thinking about Structures and Materials". He also holds the Gilles Deleuze chair at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.

Genres: Philosophy, Science, Essays, History

168 pages, Paperback

First published April 6, 2010

About the author

Manuel DeLanda (b. in Mexico City, 1952), based in New York since 1975, is a philosopher, media artist, programmer and software designer. After studying art in the 1970s, he became known as an independent filmmaker making underground 8mm and 16mm films inspired by critical theory and philosophy. In the 1980s, Manuel De Landa focused on programing, writing computer software, and computer art. After being introduced to the work of Gilles Deleuze, he saw new creative potential in philosophical texts, becoming one of the representatives of the 'new materialism'.

Reviews

[Mark Longo · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is DeLanda deciphering Deleuze and the result is almost intelligible, certainly more so than Deleuze's primary texts. The essay on materialist metaphysics and the one on intensive and extensive cartography were especially brain twisting. According to Delanda/Deleuze, reified generalities and Platonic essences are not real - reality is immanent in materiality. But then are possibilities real things? They are if they are latently possible in material things but just not currently "actuated" (This is quite different than Many Worlds type interpretations where any damn thing we can think as a possibility must be real somewhere). On a related note, are only solutions real (as per axioms and all their deductive theorems) or do the problems themselves that we try to axiomatize count as real things as well?

[Richard Smyth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another important book for me, one that helped me get a real firm grip on the work of Deleuze. The idea of the "parametrized concept" is key, I think, in understanding how thinking is changing.