Many of Gilles Deleuze’s most celebrated arguments are developed in conversation with Plato, Aristotle, Chrysippus and Epicurus. This thesis argues that ancient Stoic conceptions of causality and language and Epicurean contributions to geometry and physics are especially important to Deleuze because they significantly undergird the concepts of “event” and “problem” that characterize Deleuze’s alternative image of thought and philosophy of nature. The role of Hellenistic influences on Deleuze has been underappreciated, probably because his references are often allusive and oblique. My dissertation reconstructs and supplements Deleuze’s interpretations of these ancient Greek philosophers. I offer critical analysis and discussion of the uses to which Deleuze is trying to put them, as well as evaluations of Deleuze’s readings in light of contemporary scholarship on Greek philosophy. Specifically, I defend Deleuze’s claim that the theory of events in The Logic of Sense is derived in large part from the ancient Stoics. Despite being supplemented by a healthy dose of twentieth-century structuralism, Deleuze’s reading of the Stoics is not indefensible, especially his interpretation of incorporeal lekta as events linked by relationships of compatibility and incompatibility independent of conceptual entailment or physical causality. I also offer an entirely new evaluation of Deleuze's polemic with Aristotle’s conception of difference. The correct understanding of Deleuze’s position has been obscured by his apparent conflation of the Aristotelian concepts of homonymy and analogy. What might otherwise seem to be a misreading of Aristotle should be read as part of an incompletely realized argument to the effect that Aristotle’s account of the core-dependent homonymy of being fails. Finally I explicate Deleuze's contention that Epicurean atomism is a “problematic Idea,” which is derived from a careful but almost entirely implicit reading of both Epicurus and Lucretius. Deleuze reads the Epicurean “swerve” as a mechanism for the self-determination of physical systems, which models the capacity of problematic ideas to provoke new lines of reasoning and alternative forms of thought. The influence of Epicureanism and Stoicism on Deleuze’s late work on meta-philosophy in What is Philosophy? accounts for the way it treats the images of nature and of thought as inextricably linked. Deleuze understands the ambition to give a joint account of nature and thought to be typical of Hellenistic philosophy. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:mcmaster.ca/oai:macsphere.mcmaster.ca:11375/16154 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Bennett, Michael James |
| Contributors | Allen, Barry, Philosophy |
| Source Sets | McMaster University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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