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Virtuality in Aquinas and Deleuze: Current Tropes in Ancient Cloaks


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1 Concordia University, Canada
     

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This study suggests the benefits of including virtuality as part of the analysis of our experience. Recovery by Deleuze from Aquinas' use of virtuality is shown first by displaying Aquina' texts on cognitive and normative virtuality, divine, angelic and human virtuality, followed by Deleuze' uptake of virtuality into his metaphysical analysis. This provides one commonplace where diachronic cross-disciplinarity can appear helpfully.

Keywords

Virtuality, Possibility, Metaphysics, Deleuze, Aquinas.
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  • J. M. Baldwin, Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, 1902; new ed., P. Smith, 1960.

  • Edmund Burke on visual representation, cited in Baldwin

  • Jean Baudrillard, "Virtuality and Events: The Hell of Power," Baudrillard Studies 3.2 (2006) 1-17 at pg. 8; http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol3_2/jb_ cvirtpf.htm. See also James S. Hurley, "Real Virtuality: Slavok Zizek and Post Ideological' Ideology," Postmodern Culture 9.1 (Sept.1998);http://muse.jhu.edu/logic? auth=0+&type=summary&wil=/journals/postmodern_culture/v00.

  • Baudrillard, pg. 12.

  • Michael Heim, The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993, pg. 8.

  • Thomas Nelson, quoted in Howard Reingold, Virtual Reality, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1991, pg. 177.

  • Heim, pg. 2.

  • Peter Skagestad, "Pearce, Virtuality, and Semiotic," Paideia; Philosophy and Cognitive Science, WCP 20, 2001, pg. 1; http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Cogn/ CognSkag.htm.

  • Mark Nunes, "Baudrillard in Cyberspace: Internet, Virtuality, and Postmodernity," Style 29 (1995) 1-17 at pg. 6.

  • Nunes 6.

  • An application of these arguments to law appears, without the scope and textual display of this study, in C.B. Gray, "Topoi in Summa: Virtual Justice as Determinant for Aquinas' Placement of Law." International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 19 (2006): 325-338.

  • That medieval thought is set within a realism that supports virtuality is a famous claim by Umberto Eco, in "Dreaming of the Middle Ages," Travels in Hyperreality: Essays, tr. W. Weaver, N.Y., Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1986.

  • Both available easily in Selected Writings of St. Thomas Aquinas. Tr. R. P. Goodwin, Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill, 1965.

  • Summa Theologica, 2 vols., tr. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, New York, Benziger Brothers, 1947. The Latin text used for this and his other writings is the Omnia opera [Parma, Typi Pietro Fiaccadori, 1852-73] New York, Musurgia Publ., 1948 reprint. Citations in my text are from the English text of the Summa, unless indicated otherwise; from elsewhere, they follow my translation. Citations from the Summa use a standard format: starting with the Roman number of a part, e.g., I; followed by a question in that part, e.g., 2; then by an article in that question, e.g., 3; and by position in that article where needed, e.g., "c" for the body of its text, or "ad 4" for the answer to the fourth objection; all of these connected by commas, e.g, I, 2, 3, ad 4.

  • Dictionnaire etymologique de la langue latine. Histoire des mots. 4 ed., eds. A. Ernout, A. Meillet, Paris, C.Klincksieck, 1959; Copious and Critical Latin-English Lexicon, ed. E. A. Andrews, N.Y., Harper and Bros., 1861; A Latin Dictionary, eds. C. T. Lewis, C. Short, Oxford, Clarendon, 1879, reimpr. 1955.

  • Thomas-Lexikon, ed. L. Schutz, New York, F. Ungar Publ., reimpr. 1957; A Complete Index of the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas, ed. R. J. Deferrari, M. I. Barry, Washington D. C., The Catholic University of America Press, 1956; A Latin-English Dictionary of St. Thomas Aquinas, ed. R. J. Deferrari, Boston, St. Paul Editions, 1960.

  • Stuart Sim, ed., The Routledge Critical Dictionary of Postmodern Thought, 1999, s. v. "Virtual reality".

  • Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition [P.U.F., 1968], tr. Paul Patton, Columbia University Press, 1994. And on Deleuze' inspiration by 19th century social jurist Gabriel Tarde, see my "Tarde on Legitimacy in Legal Procedure," Values, Rights and Duties in Legal and Philosophical Discourse, ed. C. Dahlmann, Werner Krawietz, Berlin, Duncker & Humblot, 2005, 65-72.


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  • Virtuality in Aquinas and Deleuze: Current Tropes in Ancient Cloaks

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Authors

Christopher B. Gray
Concordia University, Canada

Abstract


This study suggests the benefits of including virtuality as part of the analysis of our experience. Recovery by Deleuze from Aquinas' use of virtuality is shown first by displaying Aquina' texts on cognitive and normative virtuality, divine, angelic and human virtuality, followed by Deleuze' uptake of virtuality into his metaphysical analysis. This provides one commonplace where diachronic cross-disciplinarity can appear helpfully.

Keywords


Virtuality, Possibility, Metaphysics, Deleuze, Aquinas.

References