January 26, 2007
Manuel DeLanda's in his Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy seeks to present the process-based realist philosophy of Gilles Deleuze to an audience of analytical philosophers of science and scientists with an interest in philosophical questions. DeLanda reconstructs Deleuze's ontology in scientific terms.
As we have seen in this book DeLanda juxtaposed essence to multipliciity. Multiplicity belongs to the many without having a one, and so it replaces the talk of identity of a material objects in terms of essences and natural kinds. It offers a different way of modelling complex dynamic processes. He says:
While essences are traditionally regarded as possessing a clear and distinct nature ....the singularities which define a multiplicty are by design obscure and distinct: the singularites come in sets, and these sets are both given all at once but are structured in such a way that they progressively specifiy the nature of a multiplicity as they unfold following recurrent sequences. (p.16)
The account is a mathematical one and is illustrated through differential geometry. So the language is groups (a set of entities) and symmetry (a property marked by the degree fo symmetry amongst entities).
Delanda says:
Classifying geometrical objects by their degrees of symmetry represents a sharp departure from traditional classificiation of geometical figures by their essence. While in the latter approach we look for a set properties common to all cubes, or to all spheres, groups do not classify the figures on the basis of their static properties but in terms of how these figures are affected (or not affected) by active transformations, that is, figures are classified by their response to events that occur to them. Another way of putting this is that even though in this new approach we are still classifying entities by a property (their degree of symmetry), this property is never an intrinsic property of the entity beign classified but always a property relative to a specific transformation (or group of transformations).
DeLanda shows that when we replace essence with multiplicity, we replace a hierarchical ontology of genera, species, and individual organisms (lacking causal connections), with a flat ontology that treats all spatial structures as individuals created through specific causal processes.
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How is this different from what is already worked out in Whitehead, who was himself, after all, a geometer?