The primacy of the practical: Russell Ford's Experience and empiricism: Hegel, Hume, and the early Deleuze

As the subtitle indicates, this article examines Russell Ford's new book on Deleuze's 1953 Empiricism and Subjectivity. Ford's book especially illuminates Deleuze's book on Hume in two ways. First, he shows how Deleuze's first book intervenes in an ongoing debate in French philosophy between transcendence and immanence. Second, Ford provides an intense reading of Deleuze's first book. The question, however, that Ford's book aims to answer is the nature of empiricism itself. My article reconstructs the precise definition of empiricism found in Experience and Empiricism. But also, because Ford stresses the priority of the practical in Deleuze's interpretation of Hume, my article, near the end, shows how Deleuze's view of the practical in his 1968 Difference and Repetition contests the view of the practical presented in Deleuze's Empiricism and Subjectivity.