Neither/Nor podcast · recorded 22 June 2026 · also available on other podcast platforms
Andrew Milward is an independent philosopher who, like me, found philosophy via literature. For me, it was a search for texts which treated the big questions of what matters in life, and how to live it. This led me away from logic and towards Tolstoy at university. For Andrew, it was an encounter with Orwell’s 1984 in his early 20s which, as he found that it was widely understood as a critique of the Soviet Union, led him to a history of the Russian Revolution, and on to Marx, Hegel, and eventually to Plato and the pre-Socratics. Andrew has followed his philosophical interests without the constraints (or the support!) of any institution — just as I have.
We met on the decentralised social media network Mastodon, of all places. Andrew began attending some events I host in London and has become a regular member of my writing group, First Few Books.
We spend the conversation on two of Andrew’s works. The first is his essay The Absent World (2017), which starts from the question: how can we think and speak about things we can’t see? We can talk about cities neither of us is standing in, or an essay neither of us is holding. Andrew’s move is to name a gap between sense (everything belonging to language: speech, writing, thought) and referent (what language points at, whether that’s another piece of language, a physical thing, or a mix of the two). Language generalises. It leaves out whatever isn’t needed to communicate, and that gap widens the further the referent slips out of view.
In Andrew’s view, there are two ends to the spectrum. At one end, there’s no gap at all — in logic and mathematics, sense is self-referential, pointing at its own necessity rather than at any outside object. At the other end Andrew creates a concept he calls depth, the far extreme of that gap: sense at its greatest possible distance from a referent, one that takes in everything. The payoff is not just philosophical. Depth should stop us flattening a person or a group into a conceptual label.
The second work is his book Wittgenstein and Deleuze (2025), where he sets out the method behind his earlier essays and describes what he calls a non-epistemic philosophy. His claim is that we usually recognise only two kinds of philosophy: the epistemic kind that builds knowledge, and the sceptical kind that tears it down. He wants a third kind, which does neither. From Wittgenstein he takes “Don’t think, but look!” (Philosophical Investigations §66) — turning vision on our own thinking, without any attempt to grasp some hidden reality. From Deleuze he takes the idea of concept creation (which, incidentally, I also use in my Neither/Nor paper). The important point is their combination: following Wittgenstein alone, towards description of experience, left his early attempts at philosophy flat; the Deleuzian side was needed to build concepts that change thought. Depth is one of them: a fabrication that lives in language and makes no claim to be discovering anything out there.
Toward the end we find the overlap with Neither/Nor. My paper’s oscillation — loosen concepts through perception, then reform them into something you can use — loosely rhymes with Andrew’s pairing of Wittgensteinian looking and Deleuzian creation. His duality of sense and the real also relates to my Neither/Nor distinction between the conceptual and the experiential, in that my pairing involves internal linguistic thought and the external physical world. In this connection, the Neither/Nor framework suggests the need to learn practices for both: we can lead a life not only of thought and ideas (sense), but also incorporate a skilful embodied engagement with the physicality of living (the real).
In the end, Andrew makes a case for abstraction in philosophy: although we shouldn’t consider our abstract concepts as belonging to a Platonic heaven, the universal form of abstractions allows them to move with greater fluidity in our thought. This abstraction may also bring us towards creative freedom: we can follow the path that belongs to the idea itself rather than the familiar places of existing concrete realities. But this doesn’t mean that we abandon concrete reality; each reader has to apply the abstraction to a reality of their own.
What we cover
(01:00) The route towards philosophy — literature of George Orwell to Marx to Hegel to the pre-Socratics
(04:00) Leaving academia after an MA in continental philosophy, thinking independently, and the importance of keeping notebooks
(06:00) The Absent World: how we speak about what we can’t see
(07:00) The gap between sense and referent, and the categories of sense, the real, and their combination
(11:00) Terminological clarifications and influences — Frege’s sense and reference, Lacan’s symbolic and real
(17:00) Kripke, naming, and grounding words in a causal chain
(19:00) The concept of depth, generalisation, and how it bears on prejudice and political language
(24:00) Object permanence in infancy — the origin of our understanding of the absent itself
(25:00) Neither/Nor: the distinction between concepts and experience
(26:00) Wittgenstein and Deleuze and the idea of a non-epistemic philosophy
(30:00) Is Wittgenstein anti-epistemic and Deleuze epistemic? — the unity of thought and being from Parmenides to Deleuze’s chaotic virtual, via Hegel and Kant
(35:00) Scepticism in Pyrrho and Sextus Empiricus — dogmatists, academic sceptics, and the third way
(40:00) Combining Wittgenstein’s vision with Deleuze’s concept creation
(48:00) Oscillation, abstraction, and keeping ideas tied to practice
(51:00) Writing abstractly, following instinct, and the importance of creative freedom for philosophy
People and works mentioned
Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men · Ellison, Invisible Man · Styron, Sophie’s Choice · Heller, Catch-22 · Orwell, 1984 · Marx · Hegel · the pre-Socratics · Plato, Republic · Nietzsche, The Gay Science · Kierkegaard · Frege (sense and reference) · Lacan (the symbolic and the real) · Wittgenstein, Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations · Kripke, Naming and Necessity · Deleuze, Difference and Repetition and (with Guattari) What Is Philosophy? · Parmenides · Kant · Sextus Empiricus · Pyrrho · Badiou
Links
Andrew’s essays and books: www.andrewmilward.net
The Neither/Nor paper (Kam & Granic, Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 2026): Neither/nor: a pragmatic philosophy for oscillating between conceptual and experiential knowledge
