Browsing by Author "Telivuo, Julius"

The thesis discusses the concept of the idea and the problem of the ground of experience in Gilles Deleuze s (1925-1995) Difference and Repetition and Immanuel Kant s (1724-1804) Critique of Pure Reason. Deleuze develops Kant s notion of problematic ideas further and formulates a critique of the Kantian conditions of the possibility of experience. The method of the work is a critical and comparative study of the source literature. The research interest is systematic: the historico-exegetical remarks serve to motivate Deleuze s theory and the interpretations implied by it. They are not to be understood as partaking in an interpretive discussion concerning the philosophical canon as such. The principal object of interest in the thesis is Deleuze s theory of ideas. Deleuze adopts Kant s definition of ideas as problems or problematic principles and he constructs his theory in close connection with the conceptual apparatus of the Critique of Pure Reason. The thesis begins with a short survey of Plato s concept of ideas, to which both Deleuze and Kant refer. Through a critical study, the thesis seeks to support Deleuze s claim of the ideas as concrete problems and as the genetic principles of the objects of experience. Deleuze criticises the Kantian conditions of the possibility of experience for their externality with regard to real experience: Kant s conceptual and sensible conditions of experience are the internal conditions only of possible experience. On the other hand, transcending all possible experience, the ideas are for Kant fundamentally problematic concepts, which preclude all concrete interpretations. However, they too lend themselves to a legitimate employment as regulative principles of knowledge and experience. According to Deleuze, the Kantian conceptual structures determine experience only externally and do not constitute the ground for real experience. He maintains that this ground is to be conceived as a problematic, genetic structure. He elaborates this problematic nature of the idea with the mathematical concept of the differential, which paves the way to the formulation of ideas as problematic, yet internally determined in differential relations and immanent in relation to objects of experience. Thus for Deleuze, ideas are concrete, completely determined problems, which experience manifests only in its partial solutions.