What Is Philosophy? (Paperback)

by Gilles Deleuze (Author), Félix Guattari (Author), Janis Tomlinson (Translator), Graham Burchell III (Translator) "The question what is philosophy?..." (more)
Key Phrases: intensive ordinates, conceptual personae, inseparable variations, Erwin Straus (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal
Philosophy, according to the authors, is the only study that is concerned with the creation of concepts, which distinguishes it from science, logic, and art. To support this thesis, the authors discuss the nature of these disciplines and the thought of a wide spectrum of philosophers, from Plato to Foucault. Unfortunately, singular insights are buried in a text so dense with metaphor and figurative language (e.g., "the plane of immanence," "conceptual personae") that it is impossible to decide whether they have argued their case successfully or even whether they have made their thesis fully intelligible. For academic libraries collecting these authors and continental philosophy.
Leon H. Brody, U.S. Office of Personnel Mgt. Lib., Washington, D.C.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review
Packed with insights into historical periods, art, and philosophy. . . . a particular strength of the book is the depth of its exploration of philosophical concepts--both what they are and what they presuppose. A pleasure to read, this is a rigorous structural reflection of the philosophical concept and a genuine contribution to philosophy. Highly recommended. -- R. E. Palmer

This examines the relationship between philosophy, science and the arts, considering the independent pursuits of each study and their ultimate connections. This history of social and cultural development and philosophical arguments provides a fine synthesis of Western cultural observation and philosophical argument. -- Midwest Book Review

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Columbia University Press (April 15, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0231079893
• ISBN-13: 978-0231079891
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #63,874 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A successful exposition of knowledge, October 16, 1998

By	a reader - See all my reviews

This review is from: What Is Philosophy? (European Perspectives: a Series in Social Thought and Cultural Ctiticism) (Hardcover)

First of all, this book is not an introduction to philosophy and should not be read by beginners who has not read any philosophical text before. Rather, as the writers say, this should be read by people who are engaged with philosophy for sometime either as a student or as an enthusiastic reader and who reached the point of asking the question ''What the hell I' m doing?'' This book gives the answer and lets the philosophy student recognise his/her task and continue work being much more conscious about the topic. The book carefully analyses the differences between scientific, philosophic and artistic knowledge and also succeeds in giving their relations in a clear way. Defining philosophy as ''creation of concepts'' may, at first, seem like an old and unoriginal definition but as you continue reading the book you will easily see that that definition gives way to a really original and successful conceptualization of philosophy and science. As a result I recommend this book to all students of philosophy except the freshmen whether coming from the analytic or continental tradition.

20 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Deleuze is difficult but not whimsical, September 28, 2002

By	David J Frost (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews

For a grad class "Recent French Philosophy" I am reading Deleuze and Guattari's "What is Philosophy?". I certainly don't have a review ready for it. Nor can I claim to have concrete and clear thoughts about it yet. But I do have questions and rough ideas which I will endeavor to set down simply for the practice of articulating these thoughts.

Regarding style: Many have and will complain that Deleuze obfuscates what he ought to want to make clear. The meaning of a sentence or paragraph, I will admit, is not always clear if only because Deleuze refers often to ideas outside philosophy without providing clear meaning. He alludes or make explicit reference to art works, history, his previous work, film, and political concerns without pausing to describe more completely each of these.

Deleuze however is completely serious in his task; I would deny anyone who wished to claim Deleuze was trying to evoke a mind-fudge which would somehow disrupt the knowledge-seeking mind the same way knowledge-seeking has been disrupted by poststructuralist insights. He may do this in Mille Plateau but so far in "What is Philosophy?" he is not being artful with his style. His style is dictated not by a desire to have commensurability between "gist" and mode of expression. His style is dense and difficult because he has a lot to say, is at the end of a career with much ground work done; and feels he must talk to his schoolmates (to use a phrase of Spivak's concerning Derrida). The issues dealt with in "What is Philosophy?" exist at a high level of abstraction which Deleuze has arrived at the end of his career. Let his earlier work, a familiarity with art and culture, and a close dedicated slow reading fill in the gaps in his style.

Deleuze begins with an introduction in which he suggests that the question of what is philosophy, is a question proper for old age. Indeed, this book was written not long before Guattari died and after many of their great collaborative works. Deleuze wrote at the beginning of his career detailed histories of particular individual philosophers that he felt to be in line with his and his generations project to do without Hegelian dialectics (this according to Hardt's reading). Deleuze wrote on Hume, Bergson, Nietzsche and Spinoza in this fashion. Deleuze then partnered with Guattari, a psychoanalyst and activist, to write "Capitalism and Schizophrenia" as well as the sequel, "Thousand Plateaus."

"What is Philosophy?" is very much a work in which Deleuze and Gauttari step back to survey as only an older person can do what it is they've been doing all along. The book does actually provide definitions of what philosophy is and is rigorous in explaining what the definitions mean.

Philosophy is the creation of concepts. It is not an extension of logic, nor an inquiry into the textual nature of everything. Nor is philosophy reflection, contemplation or communication although philosophy creates concepts of each of those three eventually.

So, what is it to create concepts? It seems to me that the easiest way to understand what Deleuze says about concepts is to think about it all with the aid of a 3D Cartesian graph like in a CAD program.

There is no simple or originary concept as every concept consists in more than two components and every concept is situated in relation to a philosophical problem (such as free will or perception) and is situated in relation to other concepts on the same plane and on other planes.

"For, according to the Nietzsching verdict, you will know nothing through concepts unless you have first created them -- that is, constructed them in an intuition specific to them: a field, a plane, and a ground that must not be confused with them but that shelters their seeds..."

What the concept is named, who is it's creator, and the components involved in its relation to its philosophical problem are all the idiosyncratic components of a concept each existing in our Cartesian 3D space...the concept being the "Fragmentary whole" connecting all the components.

In light of their definition of a concept, Deleuze and Guattari are able to say something to those who are often found arguing about subjectivity and objectivity or relativism and absolutes. A concept belies this dichotomy as a concept is both relative and absolute. In that a concept consists roughly speaking of relations between its components and other concepts, then a concept is relative. But to attack a concept as not-absolute is only to bring another component into our range and thereby change the concept we are dealing with.

"The concept is therefore both absolute and relative: it is relative to its own components, to other concepts, to the plane on which it is defined, and to the problems it is supposed to resolve; but it is absolute through the condensation it carries out, the site it occupies on the plane, and the conditions it assigns to the problem" [p.21].

D and G explain themselves in concrete examples which is wonderfully helpful. The examples include "the Other" and the Cartesian Ego which includes a drawing.

I am still trying to figure out if neighborhood zones, bridges, planes, and history of a concept, refer to the concepts endoconsistency and endorelations or its exorelations. I think zone is endo and plane is endo.

More later.

6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The last try, January 12, 2002

By	Jorge Maldonado (Bogota, Colombia) - See all my reviews

The book is what one could call the image-thought of Deleuze himself. What is explained in chapter two is the book itself. If one wants the answer to the question: "¿what is then the image of thought of Deleuze and Guattari?" then this book is the answer. Now, one cannot simply answer: "Creation". After reading the book and some other parts of their philosophy, one understands that that is just the external form of the answer, not worng, but not whole. A new system of philosophy "is finished" with this book. Not a hegelian system, but as Hegel did.