I want to say very quickly how I recognize a philosopher in his activity. One can only confront these activities as a function of what they create and of their mode of creation. One must ask, what does a woodworker create? What does a musician create? For me, a philosopher is someone who creates concepts. This implies many things: that the concept is something to be created, that the concept is the product of a creation. 

I see no possibility of defining science if one does not indicate something that is created by and in science. And, it happens that what is created by and in science, I'm not completely sure what it is, but not concepts properly speaking. The concept of creation has been much more linked to art than to science or to philosophy. What does a painter create? He creates lines and colors. That suggests that lines and colors are not givens, but are the product of a creation. What is given, quite possibly, one could always call a flow. It's flows that are given, and creation consists in dividing , organizing, connecting flows in such a way that a creation is drawn or made around certain singularities extracted from flows. 

A concept is not at all something that is a given. Moreover, a concept is not the same thing as thought: one can very well think without concepts, and everyone who does not do philosophy still thinks, I believe, but does not think through concepts. If you accept the idea of a concept as the product of an activity or an original creation. 

I would say that the concept is a system of singularities appropriated from a thought flow. A philosopher is someone who invents concepts. Is he an intellectual? No, in my opinion. For a concept as system of singularities appropriated from a thought flow... Imagine the universal thought flow as a kind of interior monologue, the interior monologue of everyone who thinks. Philosophy arises with the action that consists of creating concepts. For me, there are as many creations in the invention of a concept as in the creation by a great painter or musician. One can also conceive of a continuous acoustic flow (perhaps that is only an idea, but it matters little if this idea is justified) that traverses the world and that even encompasses silence. A musician is someone who appropriates something from this flow: notes? Aggregates of notes? No? What will we call the new sound from a musician? You sense then that it is not simply a question of the system of notes. It's the same thing for a philosopher, it is simply a question of creating concepts rather than sounds. It is not a question of defining philosophy by some sort of search for the truth, for a very simple reason: this is that truth is always subordinate to the system of concepts at one's disposal. What is the importance of philosophers for non-philosophers? It is that although non-philosophers don't know it, or pretend not to be interested, whether they like it or not they think through concepts which have proper names.

(Gilles Deleuze, Cours Vincennes - 15/04/1980)

Traversing the fantasy' thus does not mean that the subject somehow abandons its involvement with fanciful caprices and accommodates itself to a pragmatic 'reality,' but precisely the opposite: the subject is submitted to that effect of the symbolic lack that reveals the limit of everyday reality. To traverse the fantasy in the Lacanian sense is to be more profoundly claimed by the fantasy than ever, in the sense of being brought into an ever more intimate relation with that real core of the fantasy that transcends imaging.

(Richard Boothby, Freud as Philosopher)

When Willie Sutton was in prison, a priest who was trying to reform him asked him why he robbed banks. 'Well,' Sutton replied, 'that's where the money is.' There has been a failure to connect here, a failure of fit. Sutton and the priest are passing each other by ... Clearly there are different values and purposes shaping the question and answer. They take different things to be problematic or stand in need of explanation. For the priest, what stands in need of explanation is the decision to rob at all. He does not really care what. But for Sutton, that is the whole question. What is problematic is the choice of what to rob.

(Alan Garfinkel)

Despite the fact that questions and answers are, indeed, linguistic entities, "Why" questions involve as part of the conditions that make them answerable, or well-posed, a non-linguistic or extra-propositional aspect which is properly problematic: a distribution of the relevant and the irrelevant.

(Manuel De Landa)

The parts of an object put together in an assembly line are typically fully Euclidean, having rigid metric properties such as sizes, shapes and positions, a fact that limits the procedures that may be followed for their assembly. these procedures must include a rigidly channelled transport system (using conveyor belts or pipes to transport raw materials, and wires to transport energy and information) as well as sequences of rigid motions to correctly position the parts relative to one another. By contrast, the component parts used in biological assembly are defined less by rigid metric properties than by their topological connectivity: the specific shape of a cell's membrane is less important that its continuity and closure,and the specific length of a muscle less important than its attachment points. This allows component parts to be not inert but adaptive, so that muscle lengths can change to fit longer bones, and skin can grow and fold adaptively to cover both. It also permits transport processes not to be rigidly channeled, using simple diffusion through a fluid medium to bring the different parts together. Components may float around and randomly collide, using a lock-and-key mechanism to find matching patterns without the need for exact positioning.

All of this has consequences for the capacity to evolve through mutation and selection which each of these two assembly processes may have. If putting together organisms followed an assembly-line pattern, random mutations would have to occur simultaneously in matching parts, channels and procedures, in order to yield a viable entity on which natural selection could operate. the occurence of such a large number of simultaneous mutations is of course, a highly improbable event. In biological assembly on the other hand, mutations do not have to be so coordinated and this greatly enhances the possibilities for evolutionary experimentation.

(Manuel De Landa, from Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy)

"A successful encounter, one that is not brief, but lasts, never guarantees that it will continue to last tomorrow rather than come undone. Just as it might have not taken place, it may no longer take place. . . . In other words, nothing ever guarantees that the reality of the accomplished fact is the guarantee of its durability. Quite the opposite is true: every accomplished fact . . . like all the necessity and reason we can derive from it, is only a provisional encounter, and since every encounter is provisional even when it lasts, there is no eternity in the “laws” of any world or any state. History here is nothing but the permanent revocation of the accomplished fact by another undecipherable fact to be accomplished, without our knowing in advance whether, or when, or how the event that revokes it will come about."

"...instead of thinking contingency as a modality of necessity, or an exception to it , we must think necessity as the becoming-necessary of the encounter of contingents."

(Louis Althusser, from Althusser's Late Thinking About Materialism)