Philosophers have not been sufficiently concerned with the nature of the concept as philosophical reality. They have preferred to think of it as a given knowledge or representation that can be explained by the faculties able to form it or employ it. But the concept is not given, it is created; it is to be created.

Philosophy does not consist in knowing and is not inspired by truth. Rather, it is categories like Interesting, Remarkable, or Important that determine success of failure. Now, this cannot be known before being constructed. We will not say of many books of philosophy that they are false, for that is to say nothing, but rather that they lack importance or interest, precisely because they do not create any concept or contribute an image of thought or beget a persona worth the effort.

Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?

What is Philosophy?, first published in 1991, was Deleuze and Guattari’s final collaborative text. The book elaborates a theory of philosophical practice that concentrates on the creative activity of philosophy with close attention given to the method of creating concepts. Within the book they argue that philosophy maintains an active and dynamic relationship with the non-philosophical traditions of science and art. They seek to elaborate the creative operations of science and art in order to explicate what it is that philosophy can learn from these disciplines. For Deleuze and Guattari the task of philosophy is nothing less than creative pedagogy associated with concept creation. Fifteen years after its initial publication in France, this research group will seek to investigate the relationship between the three disciplines at stake within the book.

Research

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Darren Ambrose

Siobhan McKeown

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