fucktheory:

I finally got around to reading this article from last week’s New Yorker.  It’s always  amusing to me that 123 years after Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals and 48 years after Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions there’s still anyone who believes in the concept of objective empiricism.  As Deleuze & Guattari argue in What Is Philosophy, for science to work it doesn’t need to be true, it just needs to be relatively stable:

“…the first difference between science and philosophy is their respective attitudes towards chaos.  Chaos is defined not so much by its disorder as by the infinite speeds with which every form taking shape in it vanishes…Chaos is an infinite speed of birth and disappearance.  Now philosophy wants to know how to retain infinite speeds while gaining consistency, by giving the virtual a consistency specific to it...Science approaches chaos in a completely different, almost opposite way:  it relinquishes the infinite, infinite speed, in order to gain a reference able to actualize the virtual…science gives a reference to the virtual, which actualizes it through functions”  (118, italics in original).

What articles like this most demonstrate for me is the inescapable fact that epistemology, not metaphysics, is the first philosophy:  the first question always has to be the question of the question itself.