HUMEAN SKEPTICISM THROUGH DELEUZE’S TRANSCENDENTAL EMPIRICISM: INCLUSIVE DISJUNCTION AND EMPIRICIST SUBJECT

Abstract

This article begins with an internal argument in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze: every philosophy’s character might be evaluated by the immanence degree it accomplishes. The thought of Hume, a “superior empiricism”, as Deleuze understands it, would maintain and perform immanence. In other words, Humean Empiricism would not surrender to any transcendent. At the same time, being superior, it supposes an Empiricism that is not rooted in the immediately given, as it a “naive empiricism” might suppose. Therefore, the empiricism should embody an immanentist thought that acquires some transcendental competence, so it would be a “transcendental empiricism”, according to Deleuze’s terminology. The complex philosophical formula summarized in that Deleuzean expression will be here taken under the Humean point of view in order to envisage his skepticism as an immanence operator that offers to Empiricism a transcendental dimension. Such approach will be carried out in two steps: a) skepticism and the problem of the “inclusive disjunction” in the field of faculties’ interaction (reason/understanding and practical faculty); b) skepticism and the transcendentalism of the empirical judgments.