Hi Paul:
Transcendental empiricism to me is an unfortunate term because of all
the baggage.
My take on it is that the subtitle to the Hume volume
says it better: Empiricism and Subjectivity.
I sense that Deleuze's argument for a method involving the
triangulation of related activity in science, philosophy and the arts
within a specific historical context is to observe what might be called
(for better or for worse) laws governing structures and processes of
thought
within individual subjects, and within collectivities with a range of
structural rigidity or adaptability--
so that these "laws" apply to processes of subject formation as well as
to the range
of interactive behavior with respect to subject positions. A rhizome is
therefore an analogue, by reference
to the natural world, of an extremely flexible and adaptable
collectivity which can be analyzed by
reference to physical and chemical as well as biological laws, as well
as cognitive science--so that it
applies to the behavior of the brain as well as to an social aggregate.
The three way analogy formations seem to move beyond the early modern
opposition between the proliferation of metaphorical extensions in
alchemical
discourses and the strict one-two-one analogies typical of emergent
classical science,
as analyzed in the literature on metaphors, models and analogies in the
philosophy of science, as well as
the more obvious sources on tropology in poststructuralist literary and
historiographic theories.
My emphasis has been on making visible tropologies from physics and
cognitive science, by which
Deleuze (alone and with Guattari) seem to be trying by analogical
extension to construct an empirical ground for a
natural philosophy of subjectivity. And to do it carefully to avoid the
pitfalls of sloppy metaphorical extension
that doomed the alchemical project.
mer
Paul Bryant wrote:
> Does anyone have any thoughts on Deleuze's
> transcendental empiricism? What exactly does it
> account for in comparison to other transcendental
> approaches to philosophy? In what way is it
> transcendental? What does it mean to conjoin
> empiricism and transcendental thought? How does it
> diverge from other transcendental approaches such as
> Kant's, Fichte's, Schelling's, and Hegel's? Also, I'd
> be interested in any secondaries people might be able
> to point me to on this subject... Preferably I'm
> looking for something a little more rigerous-- on the
> order of what Gasche has done with Derrida --rather
> than something consisting of the usual platitudes
> about nomadic thought, becoming, rhizomes, etc..
>
> Thanks,
>
> Paul
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