I have already posted this link to twitter, containing my bachelors thesis, but I figured it might be good to have it here too, for crossref purposes.

Some details:

I worked on it from september last year (2019) until january this year (2020). At first I wanted to write on Meillassoux’ After Finitude, exploring what I perceived as a sort of convergence of analytic and continental philosophy. My supervisor adviced against this due to him considering it a bit too obscure. I then thought of doing a comparison of McDowells Mind and World and the aforementioned book by Meillassoux, once again to try to show more similarities between the traditions. I was recommended to drop this aswell (and I am glad I followed that advice).

After that, I decided to write on Deleuze and Guattari, who are both far more read authors (but still more or less unheard of in my philosophy department), and their relation to naturalism. That is, asking the question whether D&G are worth considering by analytic philosophy, which involves proving if they are ”scientific” or not.

As you can tell, all of my ideas for what it would be on, relates to the division of analytic philosophy and ”continental” philosophy. I know this divide is often overplayed – but it is clear that all the departments I have studied at have been intensely anti-continental. One time, talking to a professor in a class on formal logic, and on the topic of Quine, I mentioned D&G as having some similarities to him. The professor had a very strong reaction to this – saying that I should not read that nonsense – that there is no value at all in reading it – before recommending that I should instead read Sokal and Bricmonts Fashionable Nonsense.

So most of my time in these analytic department was defined by a personal crusade to show that there is some value to be found in non-analytic philosophy – culminating in this bachelor’s thesis.

That said, it is not very original. I refer quite a bit to Paul Pattons article on ”Deleuze, and Naturalism”: this is because it has basically already answered the question.

However, I felt like I wanted to focus more specifically on Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy?, rather than the entire bibliography of Deleuze, as Patton does. I feel like Patton’s article doesn’t do him justice, as his whole philosophy is presented through passing remarks on different concepts. I wanted to show how Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy as presented in What is Philosophy? even though incompatible with the popular definitions of naturalism, still maintains an opposition to superstition and religion – which is what the criteria of naturalism is meant to provide.

That is, I want to argue that naturalism is a bad criteria of what a philosophy needs to be to be worth reading, and my proof is to display the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, in What is Philosophy?

I am not sure how well it ends up. The majority of the thesis is taken up by interpreting their philosophy, instead of fully original argument and work. I would have preferred to have a few more pages at my disposal to expand my conclusion to make it a bit more convincing – and for it to not just appear out of nowhere.