Chapter

Philosophy, Sciences, Mathematics (Interview)

EXCERPT

Alain Badiou’s radical equation of ontology—the traditionally philosophical ‘account of being’—with mathematics claims to free philosophy for its contemporary task of interrogating the relation between the being which mathematics describes, and the events whose very ‘impossibility’ structures that being.

In the corollary distinction between the mere ‘veridicality’ of knowledge and the hazardous revolutionary decisions which found new truths, and in Badiou’s account of the work of founding and remaining faithful to truth-procedures—in which humans finally become subjects—are rightly discerned a truly novel configuration of political thought.

However Badiou is also a penetrating and formidably knowledgeable philosopher of science and mathematics; and his meticulous dedication to following these disciplines’ own ‘truth procedures’ has informed his work from the very beginning of his philosophical career through to 2006’s Logiques des mondes.

Collapse asks Badiou to expand on the articulation of philosophy, mathematics and science his ‘mathematical ontology’ assumes; and what its consequences might be for the ‘other’ sciences.…