Summary
Contents
Subject index
Contemporary culture, today’s capitalism - our global information society - is ever-expanding-- is ever more extensive. And yet we seem to be experiencing a parallel phenomenon which can only be characterized as intensive. This book is dedicated to the study of such intensive culture. While extensive culture is a culture of the same: a culture of fixed equivalence; intensive culture is a culture of difference, of in-equivalence – the singular. Intensities generate what we encounter. They are virtuals or possibilities, always in process and always in movement. Lash carefully defines and distinguishes the intensive from the extensive tracking this change through key areas of social life including: SociologyReligionPhilosophy Language Politics Communication
Intensive Philosophy: Leibniz and the Ontology of Difference
Intensive Philosophy: Leibniz and the Ontology of Difference
Leibniz, Aristotle, Ontology
Georg Simmel, we just saw, gives us a basis for an intensive sociology. Unlike ‘epistemological’ positivism, Simmel's vitalist sociology is very much ontological. Simmel, who understood his own work as ‘metaphysical’, was influenced by Leibniz. We introduced Leibniz's monad in the context of Simmel's Lebenssoziologie. Leibniz's monad is at the foundations of ontological knowledge (though cf. Badiou 2005). When Heidegger says, writing in the heyday of neo-Kantian positivist epistemology, that we have forgotten the question of ontology or being, he directs us back to Aristotle. Aristotle says at the outset of his Metaphysics (1998) that the purpose of philosophy, of ‘first philosophy’, which is metaphysics (‘second philosophy’ is ...
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