Talk:Multiplicity (philosophy)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	Philosophy Portal This article is within the scope of the WikiProject Philosophy, which collaborates on articles related to philosophy. To participate, you can edit this article or visit the project page for more details.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the quality scale.
Low	This article has been rated as low-importance on the importance scale.
Additional information: This article has been marked as needing immediate attention! Related task forces (core areas): Metaphysics

Nobody could possibly get even a rough idea of what "multiplicity" (as used by Deleuze) is supposed to mean by reading this article. Also, please make it clear if and when authors are being directly quoted, and cite sources. Dbtfz 20:46, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

• Agreed. I have no idea what this article is talking about. Yvh11a 18:24, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

Yes, not a very well made page.

Deleuze actually borrowed the word Multiplicity from Henri Bergson[[1]] (Matter and Memory, Creative Evolution), and although it is usually translated as Multiplicity in English books (From French, Multiplicités) the way the term is used is actually often thought to be closer in meaning to the mathematical term 'Manifold'[2] which is a topological space in which each point has a neighborhood that is homeomorphic to an open set in a Euclidean space of specified dimension.Stuart Milgram 12:59, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

Aye, it's fairly crucial that multiplicity means, most simply, manifold (God help us when manifolds are the most simple way of understanding something). Deleuze never gives a straight-up definition (so, analytic philosophers should probably... defenestrate themselves, like our boy Gilles).

This page is pretty terrible... but I can hardly blame the poor bugger that wrote it. I started writing one just now, but it's difficult to do without writing an essay (rather than encyclopedia entry). Whilst, obviously, it needs a paragraph or two introduction, I can't see how it's explicable without a 'maybe think of it like this...' part, followed by some explanation of why Deleuze developped the concept, where he developped it from &c.

Well, hopefully stick something up soon. Baadog 1:07, 01 February 2007

In Foucault (1986), Deleuze states his sources for the concept: "It was Riemann in the field of physics and mathematics who dreamed up the notion of 'multiplicity' and different kinds of multiplicities. The philosophical importance of htis notion then appeared in Husserl's Formal and Transcendental Logic, and in Bergson's Essay on the Immediate Given of Awareness". Thus I have changed the article, which claimed it was Deleuze's invention. Unfortunately I don't know the way to best cite the reference so I've left it in parenthesis in the text... Paralysisordeath 03:09, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

What German terms were used by Bernhard Riemann, Karl Weierstrass, Georg Cantor and Edmund Husserl which were then translated as multiplicités or multiplicité? Is it basically Vielheit? Part of the complexity here is in moving between German, French and English (as well as between developing philosophical uses, each of which stands in some relation to mathematical uses which have themselves developed & specialized since the C19th). There needs to be, I suggest, a section on multiplicity in Husserl's Philosophy of Arithmetic, a section on multiplicity in Bergson, a section on Deleuze, and also something on Badiou. Dsp13 (talk) 14:25, 24 November 2007 (UTC)