Eagerness for experience: Dewey and Deleuze on the problematic of thinking and learning

Richard Rorty, in his Consequences of Pragmatism, acknowledging the pragmatic direction taken by both modern and postmodern philosophy, declared that "James and Dewey were not only waiting at the end of the dialectical road which analytic philosophy traveled, but are waiting at the end of the road which, for example, Foucault and Deleuze are currently traveling." Gilles Deleuze, a French poststructuralist philosopher, never cited John Dewey; however, he was familiar with Charles Sanders Peirce, whose unorthodox logic or triadic semiotics Deleuze used in a number of his original works. This chapter does not aim to establish who traveled the farthest along the road posited by Rorty. Instead, its purpose is to trace a common direction as a sort of pragmatic trajectory that will map a territory constituting both philosophers' anti-Cartesian image of thought, which encompasses, contra static factual knowledge, a dynamic process of experimental learning from experience