The philosopher, guard-dog of the truth and of the desire for truth, is committed to alētheia. The sophist, this wolf for as long as there have been philosophers, is committed to the pseudos. Pseudos names, from its origin, and indissolubly, the “false” and the “lie” – the “falsehood,” therefore, of one who deceives and/or deceives himself. It is the ethico-logical concept par excellence. The Sophist of Plato explicitly marks this double bind, which joins the sophistic and pseudos in the eyes of philosophy: the sophist is an imitation, a feral counterfeit of the philosopher,² because the sophist chooses the domain of...

In April of 2014, while I was in residence at the Townsend University Center at UC Berkeley, I taught a four-week graduate seminar entitled “Animation/Reanimation: New Starts in Eternal Recurrence,” and, in relation to that seminar, I delivered publically the Una’s Lecture, entitled “Odysseus’s Changed Soul: A Contemporary Reading of Plato’s Myth of Er.” Two years later, in April of 2015, I revised this lecture in preparation for publication in the present volume, and delivered it as a new talk at UC San Diego. The title of the lecture this time was “Plato Reader of Agamben, From Homo Sacer to...

I was going to have said that Hegel was blunt, but his reputation precedes him, no doubt, and such an obvious lie would have cast suspicion on the rest of my contribution. Let me say, instead, that he has the virtue of being certain of his interpretation of the history of philosophy, certain of how each part fits into the framework he provides, and certain that providing a framework is the task of philosophy as such. And if even Hegel can be forgiven for any particular misreading, the more troubling betrayal lies in the certainty that philosophy is defined and...

In Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze outlines a theory of ideas as problems, existent on the level of a virtuality distinct from, but irreducibly related to, that of their incarnation in a variety of specifically constituted theoretical domains:

Following Lautman and Vuillemin’s work on mathematics, ‘structuralism’ seems to us the only means by which a genetic method can achieve its ambitions. It is sufficient to understand that the genesis takes place not between one actual term, however small, and another actual term in time, but between the virtual and its actualisation – in other words, it goes from the structure to...

What is the problem of which metaphysics is the inquiry? Passing by Heidegger’s imagistic allusions to soil, extrapolated from Descartes’s letter to Picot outlining the arborescence of philosophy (a metaphor Deleuze turned on its side),¹ perhaps it was the great rival to Heraclitus, Parmenides,² who, eschewing organic metaphor altogether, truly expressed it best: the same is to think as to be.³ The gap, indistinction, or indiscernibility between “thought” or thinking and “what is,” by no means necessarily a “separation” to be resolved, is what metaphysics names, and it goes without saying that working out the places and operations implies and...

The previous chapters’² conclusions may seem negative: the science without name, to which editors and commentators will give the ambiguous title Metaphysics, seems to oscillate without end between an inaccessible theology and an ontology incapable of tearing itself away from dispersion. On the one hand, an object too distant; on the other, a reality too close. On the one hand, a God ineffable since, immutable and one, he escapes from the grasp of a thought that divides that of which it speaks; on the other, a being that, insofar as it is in motion, escapes, through its contingency, from a...

How does an entity come to be? The production of artifacts is of course easily explained through the technical human capacity for identifying (and indeed – under capitalism – generating) needs and wants, and designing and manufacturing solutions from cooking vessels to drone weapons. But, despite the advances of systems chemistry, molecular biology, and both ecological and developmental biology, the coming to be or ontogenesis of natural entities remains fundamentally mysterious, both in the sense of the original emergence of living order from its physico-chemical environment, and in the sense of the development of an individual organism from germ cell to adult...

In Gender: Antiquity and Its Legacy, Brooke Holmes makes the controversial claim that sexual difference in Aristotle is contingent, belonging to a “realm more fluid and accidental than that of essence and principles – namely, the realm of matter.”¹ This position would see the difference between the male and female contributions – semen and menses – as a material one. If it is material, I maintain that it reveals something about how material operates in Aristotle. The effort to distinguish material from form requires affirming either a formal difference between them or a material difference. If the difference between them is formal, as...

Contemporary philosophy of science has been characterized as a debate between realists, idealists, and skeptics about whether science gives us knowledge, and if so what kind.⁵ Twentieth-century analytic philosophy featured a debate between logical empiricism, represented by Carnap, Hempel, Reichenbach, and others, and the historicist view of science associated with such philosophers as Hanson, Kuhn, and Feyerabend. The extreme version of this debate, perhaps not held by any of these, would pit a radical objectivism against an equally radical subjectivism. Within continental philosophy, meanwhile, the primacy of consciousness in the natural and social sciences has been emphasized, though it remains...

Presently there is a flood of ontologies, an uproar over being. Not only is metaphysics permitted, it has become, perhaps, expected. Not that continental philosophy has returned to some sort of Wolffian systematic science of ontology. Rather, we now find ourselves inundated by a variety of ontological styles: it seems that every philosopher and scholar has their own theory of being. To make our way through this torrent, we might ask: what is ontology? How can we speak of being? Can it be narrated, accounted for, expressed? In this essay I explore three philosophically and historically decisive answers to these...

As even a cursory reading of his many books and articles makes clear, Graham Harman means to change the course of contemporary philosophic inquiry in at least two fundamental ways. He wants to revive realism and metaphysics. And he wants to put objects back at the center of metaphysical inquiry.¹ In the case of the first goal, Harman has a number of allies, including his fellow speculative realists; in the case of the second, he is much lonelier. Or at any rate, he has few contemporary allies. Harman claims that his object-oriented thinking not only has roots in the “key...

Following Epicurus, Lucretius discovered how to determine the speculative and practical object of philosophy as “naturalism.” Lucretius’ importance in philosophy is linked to this double determination.

The products of nature are not separable from a diversity which is essential to them. But thinking the diverse as diverse is a difficult task upon which, according to Lucretius, all preceding philosophers have shipwrecked.¹ In our world, natural diversity appears in three intersecting aspects: the diversity of species, the diversity of individuals that are members of the same species, and the diversity of parts which compose an individual. Specificity, individuality, and heterogeneity. There...

Written by Lucretius in the first century BCE, De Rerum Natura is an elaboration of Epicurean atomism that ranges over the origin of the universe, the formation of worlds, weather systems, the emergence of life and of social order, morality, and much else besides.¹ It can be picked over for interesting anticipations of modern atomism and of evolutionary theory. Yet, as a materialist account of the emergence of order, it depends on an account of causality and law which has some surprises, and it is on these that I want to focus here. The familiar image of atoms moving and...

We begin with two events – two deaths, in fact. The first is the death of the Roman Stoic Seneca.¹ After a complicated history as an imperial adviser to Nero, Seneca was ordered to commit suicide by that infamous Roman emperor. Affirming this fate, Seneca cut an artery on his arm in an attempt to bleed to death. Since he was so old and frail, however, his arteries were weak and barely able to pump blood; death would not be so easy for Seneca. He thus cut arteries on his leg and behind his knees, yet even this did not kill...

Skepticism is often understood in terms of its epistemological implications alone, namely that we cannot have any certain knowledge. Throughout the history of philosophy, skepticism has been an important partner in conversation for exactly its epistemological position – if only to reject what many consider its unwanted outcomes. In the work of Giorgio Agamben, however, we find another way of retrieving some of the basic terms and concerns of ancient skepticism for ontology. Agamben shows that the skeptic’s philosophical vocabulary allows us to articulate an alternative to both the affirmation of being characteristic of ontotheology, as well as the negation of...

The concept of emanation is central to Plotinus’ ontology, appearing throughout the Enneads. It has, however, been historically difficult for modern interpreters to grasp, due to the often vague, metaphorical language with which Plotinus discusses it. As far back as 1937, A. H. Armstrong sums up the state of research by stating that “the difficulty is not so much to discover what Plotinus meant by ‘ emanation’ [. . .] The difficulty is to see what the precise philosophical meaning of this conception is.”¹ Most scholars, he claims, acknowledge this difficulty but do not attempt any serious resolution of...

“From metaphysics to ethics”: what kind of transition is signaled by this title? Certainly it is not a matter of progressing from an axiomatic foundation to its corollaries, or shifting attention from one discrete domain to another. Just as this volume has not explored unidirectional “influences” (Latin influo, “flow into”) from ancients to moderns, but rather cultivated their ongoing interactions, similarly we do not want to think metaphysics as a reservoir from which ethics are “derived” (Latin deriuo, “channel away”). Contemporary continental philosophies, like most Greek and Roman philosophies, tend to develop as complex Gestalten: metaphysical, ethical, and many other...