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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

Deleuze defined philosophy as something like “the creation of concepts.” I’ve always found that to be the best way to think of the field. It’s also a refreshingly creative one, because “philosophy” courses tend to really be “history of philosophy” courses that cover already-existing concepts.

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It can be the studying of past ideas that have deeply influenced the cultural, societal, political and scientific norms. Something as fundamental as Cartesian epistemology characterises much of the Enlightenment and its values. It's a fundamental belief about the nature of human knowledge that has far-reaching effects. German post-Kantian idealism is the breeding ground for grand-narrative political ideologies and nationalism. Wittgenstein's analytical approach to language and his rejection of most philosophy as a language play is the basis for the post-modern worldview.

For sure, but when you spend years and years covering the classics, reading someone like Deleuze is an immense breath of fresh air.

Although I find the notion of philosophy being like "the creation of concepts" rather limiting (philosophy can be this, but much more), if we stick with this notion, I still think it's not entirely correct.

If philosophy were to create concepts, then the question immediately arises of how one would determine whether these concepts were created correctly, or truthfully. The understanding here is that concepts are universal, and not contingent on anything, including on how they were "created". Instead, I think Deleuze should have defined philosophy as something like "the discovery of concepts, a discovery that, once accomplished, reveals to us something we had already known."

Full disclosure: I'm defining concept not in the regular, everyday way, but more in line with Hegelian, Idealist way--der Begriff.

I don’t think I’d call Deleuze “wrong” based on my one line description, if you haven’t read him yourself.

The rest of your comment seems predicated on a Platonic idea of concepts; which is definitely not in line with how Deleuze thinks about things. His ideas are very much not in line with the typical way of thinking about concepts as universal things we discover.

Edit: I should note here that I’m not an expert on Deleuze or Platonism, but I would probably say that Deleuze’s skepticism makes more intuitive sense to me.

At the university I work at, Université Paris 8 Vincennes–Saint-Denis, where Gilles Deleuze was a faculty and one of the founder of the philosophy department (along with Michel Foucault, François Chatelet, François Lyotard, and René Scherer), the philosophy department is a part of the "UFR Arts" (UFR, unité de formation et de recherche, are components of the university in which the departments exists) along with the departments of cinema, musicology, theater, photography, dance, images technology, and plastic arts.

In some ways this view emphasizes the active and creative aspect of philosophical thinking

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