Jeffrey Bell, Philosophy, SE Louisiana

9:03 AM PST. Nathan Brown briefly introduces Bell, listing his chief publications.

9:06 Bell: Deleuze in 1967, in response to a question, denied that philosophy should be a midwife for the sciences. Deleuze: “Science has not yet found its metaphysics. But that metaphysics should be in the style of Whitehead, not of Kant.”

9:08 Deleuze, “Hume’s Treatise will remain the basis for all further philosophy”

9:09 Each actual entity is a process that absorbs all other actual entities in a single satisfaction, and thus every actual entity is just subject and superject. (Bell covering Whitehead’s basic concepts in order to set the table for his own argument.)

9:11 Bell concedes that Hume is a skeptic, but he still reads him as a realist.

9:12 Hume right that habit and custom are vital to our knowledge of the world. If transported all of a sudden to an unfamiliar environment (like Bell himself to a cricket match in England one time, which he didn’t understand in the least) we would be lost. But does this mean there is no reality to the cricket match for Bell (according to Hume)? No. Reality always exceeds what we know, even for Hume, and this is why Hume was not troubled by his famous example of the missing shade of blue. Hume= hyper-realist.

9:14. Deleuze, “our scientific concept of things requires a subrepresentational reality, and thus metaphysics needs Whitehead rather than Kant.”

9:14. Bell now turns to a discussion of Meillassoux. Summary of ancestrality. [Note: Meillassoux has it made in the USA now. Pretty much everyone has read his book and takes it seriously.]

9:17. Citation of DeLanda, Protevi, and Bryant.

9:17. Philosophy is not an adjunct of mathematics or science.

9:18. How do Deleuze and Meillassoux differ on the question of sufficient reason?

9:19. Summary of Meillassoux’s rejection of sufficient reason. Solid summary by Bell.

9:20. By contrast, Deleuze as a Spinozist proceeds differently.

9:21. Deleuze/Guattari’s last work, science models the actual, philosophy counter-actualizes.

9:22. for Deleuze, sufficient reason is the hyper-reality of multiplicity, not just a delusion as for Meillassoux.

9:23. Deleuze is neither a correlationist nor a realist, but a monist.

9:24 Deleuze’s “line of flight” escapes any attempt to reduce it to a correlation.

9:24. But neither is Deleuze a realist. Deleuze, like Latour, thinks that the notion of independent realities requires a cooling down of the plate tectonics of events. [Note: this is an accurate account of Latour, but in my opinion it’s the weakness rather than the strength of Latour’s ontology.]

9:26. Latourian ontology is “monistic” because there are nothing but objects and events in it.

9:27. Between realism and anti-realism there is the “and”, and that’s where Whitehead is. Praise for Whitehead (and tacitly Latour) for occupying that middle ground.