Our guest today, Nathan Widder of Royal Holloway University, proposes a possible way to navigate this dilemma.   For Nathan, the concept that constitutes this guiding thread is the concept of sense.  From his earliest published work–an essay reviewing Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence–to his two magni opei (Difference and Repetition, and the aptly named The Logic of Sense), the concept of sense is, according to Nathan, the organizing conceptual principle that drives all of Deleuze’’s analyses and animates his philosophical questioning.   

So, what is the concept of sense in the work of Deleuze?  What does he mean by it, and how does it organize his philosophical project?  These are the questions we tackle in this week’s episode – and if you’’e worried that you do not know much about Deleuze, worry no more, because neither did we.   But thanks to Nathan and his new book Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of Sense: The Role and Development of the Concept of Sense in Deleuze’s Early Thought  (SUNY Press, 2026) we all learned a lot – and so will you.

In this episode, we reference the following thinkers, ideas, texts, etc.:

• Gilles Deleuze, What is Philosophy? 
• Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit” 
• Jean Hyppolite, Logic and Existence
• Hegel, The Science of Logic
• Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit
• Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass
• Plato, Parmenides
• Heidegger, Being and Time
• Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France (1954-1955)
• Jscques Derrida, “Différance,” in Margins: Of Philosophy
• Jacques Derrida on undecidability and in-decision
• Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener 
• Michael Parkinson interviews Muhammed Ali
• Dun Scotus, Treatise on the First Principle
• Bernard Riemanns’ concept of surface, discussed in Herman Weyl, The Concept of a Riemann Surface
• Nietzsche, The Will to Power