Deleuze on Number
Deleuze’s Philosophy of Number This is the first of a two part post on Deleuze's philosophy of number. I'm still working on part II, but would still love any feedback, criticism, or requests for clarification in the meantime. I've tried to write this in a way that requires as little prior mathematical knowledge as possible. §1: Extensive and Intensive Number Here I want to explicate Deleuze’s philosophy of number. More specifically, I want to explicate his thesis about the genesis of extensive numbers. First, what are extensive numbers? Extensive numbers are simply numbers as we know them, for example: 1, 2, 3, etc. These are usually called the “natural numbers”, and are one class (type) of numbers among others (there are also the irrationals, the reals, the imaginary numbers and so on). What Deleuze calls ‘extensive numbers’ in fact covers all these kinds of numbers, but we’ll take our starting point from the naturals because they are simple and familiar. It...