ABSTRACT
Empiricism, more often than not, appears as a chapter in a history of philosophy, rather than as a continuing philosophical force. David Hume is usually cast in a transitional role-linking Locke and Berkeley with Kant, who would ‘correct’ Hume and synthesize the abstract strains of rationalism and empiricism. But such a history of philosophy, with its linear and teleological narrative of development, tends to kill off each thinker with the appearance of the next, failing to grasp the complexity of an individual philosopher in favour of telling a general story of philosophy. Gilles Deleuze has always resisted this sort of history of philosophy. But he has done so, ironically, by returning to the history of philosophy in such a way that certain thinkers, his ‘nomads’, burst from the narrative, resisting and escaping from facile categorizations of their thought, which the history of ideas imposes upon them. A dramatic example of this return is Deleuze’s first study, on Hume, Empiricism and Subjectivity.
