Deleuze as a Philosopher of Education: Affective Knowledge/Effective Learning

This essay addresses Gilles Deleuze's “pedagogy of the concept” as grounded in the triadic relation between percepts, affects, and concepts. Philosophical thinking based on the “logic of affects” necessarily leads to the creation of novel concepts in/for experience. Still, new concepts are themselves informed by the physicality of affects thus bridging the dualistic gap of the Cartesian subject. Deleuze's neorealist position considers the objects of real experience to be both actual and virtual. Experience exceeds private sense-data; it is a milieu providing an ability to affect and be affected. The essay presents Deleuze's virtual ontology as an unorthodox “foundation” for knowledge under the provision that the affective conditions in real experience for the actualization of the virtual will have been fulfilled. Deleuze's practical philosophy is used here to offer a model for solving the “learning paradox” that has been haunting us since the days of Socrates.     

A perplexing document in the early history of Gilles de la Tourette Syndrome: Melotti's rendition of a "Lecture of Charcot" (including a complete translation from the Italian with commentary)

In 1885, Dr. Guilio Melotti published an Italian translation of a lecture on "Convulsive Tics with Coprolalia and Echolalia" given by Jean-Martin Charcot. Although this lecture often has been cited as an authoritative statement of Charcot's view, until now it has not been translated into English. The lecture presents a number of statements that appear nowhere else in Charcot's published corpus, including some that seem to contradict Charcot's other pronouncements on maladie des tics. Although the Melotti-Charcot lecture may portray Charcot's position accurately in many passages, the article most likely is a compilation from a variety of sources.