Overview

Bill Ross demonstrates the relation between Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of difference and the conceptual foundations of contemporary physics through careful engagements with the theory of relativity, quantum physics and chaos and complexity theory. Ross shows that recent work in cosmology by figures such as Lee Smolin and David Bohm calls into question the assumption that the laws of physics are universal and unchanging, a view that Deleuze anticipates. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that order in the universe as a whole is destined to break down. Against this, Ross demonstrates that, given Deleuze's conception of the event as an expression of non-locality, and his emphasis on dissymmetry over symmetry, at the cosmological scale the universe is not destined towards disorder: evolution outruns entropy.

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9781399527361

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Reviews

In classical physics and its mechanical paradigm, events are stories about fundamental objects. In quantum physics, it is the objects that are the stories by which we understand physical systems in their most fundamental form--as histories of events. In Order and the Virtual, Bill Ross makes a compelling case that the event-ontological philosophies of Deleuze and Whitehead will become for the new physics what the philosophies of Newton and Locke were for the old.--Michael Epperson, Research Professor and Director, California State University, Sacramento

Author Information

Bill Ross (1964 - 2022) had a lifelong passion for the connections between science and philosophy. In 1999 he founded Clinamen Press and more recently he taught philosophy at Staffordshire University. His publications include Michel Serres, Henri Bergson and ‘Retardation in Reinhold Clausjürgens and Kurt Röttgers (eds.) Michel Serres: das vielfältige Denken (2020) and ‘Michel Serres and Jean-François Lyotard: Global Society, Immortality and Informatics’, Angelaki (2023).

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