A sketch of one of these things with “Kierkegaard” centrally scrawled graces the cover of Witold Gombrowicz’s “Guide to Philosophy.” A totalizing way of thought named for these objects has “made us suffer too much” and should be discarded for one resembling a network of multiplicities, according to A Thousand Plateaus. Translations by Ramon Llull (“L’YOOL”) and Boethius include drawings of one of these things illustrating Aristotle’s Categories, as introduced in Porphyry’s (*) Isagoge (“eye-suh-GO-gay”). Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy compares the subject of philosophy to one of these things, ascending from metaphysics and physics to sciences at the top. In William James’s Pragmatism, a man chases a squirrel around one of these objects. For 10 points, what plants are often used to analogize hierarchical structures? ■END■
ANSWER: trees [accept arborescent; accept Porphyrian tree or Tree of Porphyry; accept tree of philosophy] (A Thousand Plateaus is by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who contrast “arborescent” knowledge with their idea of “rhizomes.”)
<RK, Philosophy>
= Average correct buzz position