Thursday, October 20, 2016

Toscano's Philosophy and Individuation Between Kant and Deleuze

Some time back I had offered a "Metaphysics of Individuation" summer reading group to be accomplished with some of my former students. At the time I was unaware of Toscano's book, which I am linking HERE at his academia.edu page where it is available for free in its entirety. It seems to me that this would have been a perfect addition though.

Some of the things we covered were de Castro's "Cosmologies: Perspectivism," Latour's "What is Given in Experience?," Latour's "The Whole is Always Smaller than the Parts," "Gabriel Tarde and the End of the Social" also by Latour, and then about three or four articles on Simondon (notably "The Position of the Problem of Ontogenesis" and "The Genesis of the Individual").  An article on "Raymond Ruyer and the Genesis of Living Forms" was especially helpful as was "A Peircean Theory of Individuation from the Continuum."

Book-wise we looked at some of Sherburne's A Whiteheadian Aesthetic; Tarde's Monadology and Sociology; some of Bennett's Vibrant Matter; some of Levinas's Time and the Other. To conclude we looked at Ernst Haeckel's Art Forms in Nature.

I think that it would be a great graduate seminar to run, actually. Not that I currently teach graduate courses (only undergraduates) - though if given the opportunity I think it'd be an interesting course to teach.