Date: Thu, 08 Oct 1998 09:59:34 +0800
From: Paul Bains <P.Bains-AT-murdoch.edu.au>
Subject: Re: Burroughs,P. Orridge, ontology


I can't remember who, but there was a short mail recently about ontology as
the science of Being-as-being going back to Aristotle.

I'm no philosopher but i suspect that Duns Scotus seeks to distinguish his
philosophy from Aristotle's metaphysics on principally two grounds: It is
univocal and it antecedes the division of being into
mind-dependent/mind-independent.

Aristotelian metaphysics is concerned with being as existing outside the
mind. For Aristotelianism there are only two types of distinctions: what is,
is divided into beings of nature or of reason. In the same way distinctions
are either 'real' or of 'reason'.

Scotus goes beyond this with his 'subtle' third 'formal' distinction (from
which univocity follows). Being cannot be reduced to the being proper to
metaphysics in the traditional sense because it cannot be identified with
either side of the division of being into what is and what is not
independent of being known! Being antecedes and is irreducible to these
distinctions.

Deleuze takes up and develops an ontology that existed as early as the 13th
century in the latin west - and probably in many other places too (tibet,
isle of sky,  nova scotia). A logic of sense - or a semiotic neither
reducible to the mind's workings nor to a prejacent pregiven (substance).
(Heidegger's first published bk, 1916, is on Scotus and signs). 

paul.

[rob lord]
I've not come across it before but its a fantastic little nutshell.  It 
seems clear to me that Deleuze never went down the Foucaultian path in a 
denial of any kind of ontology, but while Maintaining an ontology, he also 
desires to distance himself form any essentialised ontology which the 
Foucaultians were right in attacking.