The Skull and the Brain

Damasio, Bergson and Deleuze on the Relation between Science and Metaphysics

Abstract

In this paper I examine both the relationship between metaphysics and science presupposed by Damasio’s use of Spinoza’s parallelism and its relevance to some current neurobiological developments. In order to do this, I review different ways in which such parallelism has been understood, showing that each presupposes a different view of the relationship between metaphysics and science. First, I present the approach used by Bergson whose view attempts to replace substance monism with life monism and mechanistic parallelism with an organicist parallelism. But while a legality is replaced by another, the whole is conceived under one and the same law. It is to solve this problem that Deleuze and Guattari designed a parallelism in which the different dimensions of the real express the same reality; but now that reality behaves and is described in different ways.