ABSTRACT
Following a reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy?, the chapter establishes a methodological approach that would appreciate the discipline’s singularity without indulging in the grandiosity of understanding it as a “meta-science.” According to Deleuze and Guattari, philosophy is a discipline that involves creating concepts that (1) are composed of particles; (2) have a history; (3) are non-referential answers to events; (4) are created on a plane of transcendence or immanence. This leads to a vision of philosophical methodology (and polemics) as the understanding of the particles the concepts are formed of and the planes they are formed on, informing the reading of philosophers analyzed in the next two chapters, as well as projecting a more productive relationship between philosophy and other disciplines, especially science. The ending of the chapter contains preliminary remarks on what it means that the animal is first and foremost a philosophical concept.
