Plato and Deleuze

I’ve just started a new course at the Free University Brighton looking at Plato and Deleuze. Here’s the course outline and the first lecture. If you want to join in you’re welcome to join my Discord if you’re not in the Free University Brighton, details on the about page.

The playlist for the course is here.

Course Outline

The aim in this course will be to read three of Plato’s texts in the light of the critical response offered by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. From Plato we will read Phaedrus , Statesman and Sophist which look a t questions of love, politics and knowledge. We will examine the Socratic method, as Plato develops it, that involves dialectic , a process of conflict and irony (elenchus) that enables the truth to be found even if it doesn’t actually present it in a specific package for easy consumption.

From Deleuze we will read a selection of extracts from his works because his comments on Plato are scattered throughout numerous books and essays. Deleuze claims that at the heart of Plato’s work is the problem of selection how to choose between rival contenders to a claim. Who is it who truly knows? Who is it who truly loves? Who is it who is truly just? For Deleuze, the problem with Plato is that the method he uses to determine the true claimant is flawed from the beginning because of the way in which it establishes a ‘model copy’ relationship that is conceptually incoherent.

Reading

Plato
The Phaedrus
The Statesman
The Sophist

Deleuze
‘Plato and the simulacrum’ (from The Logic of Sense)
‘Introduction: the question then…’ (from What is Philosophy)
‘Plato, the Greeks’ (from Essays critical and clinical)
‘To have done with judgement’ (from Essays critical and clinical)
extracts 1 (from Difference and Repetition)