The Shell B: Paradoxes

Abstract

We consider the importance of paradoxes in Stoic logic insofar as they pervert good and common sense through forms of absurdity. To proceed, we recall how the Stoics developed a new logic, one most scholars did not consider viable logic until the nineteenth-century: propositional logic. Their propositional logic contrasts with Aristotle’s categorical logic. For Deleuze, the Stoics are most original in their art of paradoxes. Paradoxes are absurd, and there are three dimensions of absurdity, corresponding to the three dimensions of the circle of the proposition: denotated, manifest, and signifying absurdity. Paradoxes are important for materialists because they account for the genesis of language and logic. We then consider four Stoic paradoxes: Heap, Liar, Master, and Nobody. Each expresses ambiguity, a double-sided surface that turns on what Deleuze’s “the aleatory point.” Corresponding to the distinction from “The Yolk B,” between the formal (now propositional) logic of bodies on one side of the incorporeal surface and the transcendental logic of incorporeals on the other side, we close with two forms of inference: ergo, the cognitive deduction in propositional logic facing organized bodies, and igitur, the production of cognition through the Stoic art of paradoxes facing disorganized matter.