Actual Virtual Journal's video: Pete Wolfendale - Ariadne s Thread: Temporality and Modality in Deleuze s Metaphysics

A/V .01 2013 Spring http://www.actualvirtualjournal.com/2014/11/av16.html The aim of this paper is to outline a number of fairly classical metaphysical problems, and to provide a sketch of Deleuze’s solutions to these problems that demonstrates the ways in which they are interconnected. This involves a preliminary analysis of the nature of metaphysics and metaphysical problems, focusing on the relation between logic and metaphysics, before delving into three problems in particular: the problem of universals (Ideas), the problem of possibilia (Virtuality and Actuality), and the problem of time (Chronos and Aion). Moving on to Deleuze’s solution to these problems, the paper shows how Deleuze reconfigures the Platonic formulation of the problem of universals by shifting from conceiving their reality as analogous to that of individuals to conceiving it in terms of conditions of individuation, namely, spaces (Ideas as manifolds). It then goes on to show the way in which Deleuze’s account of universals qua spaces reconfigures the Leibnizian formulation of the structure of possibility and probability by shifting from conceiving their reality as analogous to that of actual states, composed by combinatorially varying representations of universals and particulars, to conceiving it as intrinsic to the universals themselves qua spaces (Virtuality as capacity and tendency). It culminates by relating this to Deleuze’s theory of time, showing how Deleuze differentiates time qua time from space in terms of the role it plays in unifying the various universals into a unitary space (the Plane of Immanence) by collapsing their local actual times (Chronos) into a global virtual time (Aion). Dr Wolfendale has since revised this paper, and an updated version of this paper on his Deontologistics blog: ‘Deleuzian Catharsis’. Dr. Pete Wolfendale is a recent graduate of the University of Warwick (The Question of Being: Heidegger and Beyond), and is currently an unaffiliated Kantian philosopher roaming the North East of England. Pete is a former editor of Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy (vol. 19-20) and has a long running philosophy blog combined with a more recent twitter account. He is currently working on everything from the history and methodology of metaphysics, inferentialist modal semantics, and the reformulation of Socratic/Hegelian dialectical logic, to the foundations of rationality, and the relationship between aesthetics and practical philosophy. These ideas and more will appear in his forthcoming books Essay on Transcendental Realism and The Demands of Thought.