Badiou and Philosophy

Sean Bowden is an Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Deakin University, Australia. He is the author of The Priority of Events: Deleuze’s Logic of Sense (Edinburgh University Press, 2011), and has published a number of articles and book chapters on Badiou, Deleuze and Simondon. Simon Duffy is a Research Associate in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Sydney, Australia. He is the author of The Logic of Expression: Quality, Quantity and Intensity in Spinoza, Hegel and Deleuze (Ashgate, 2006), and is the editor of Virtual Mathematics: The Logic of Difference (Clinamen, 2006). He recently translated the French collection of the work of Albert Lautman, Mathematics, Ideas and the physical real (Continuum, 2011).

• Acknowledgments; Abbreviations; Contributors; 1. Badiou’s Philosophical Heritage, Sean Bowden & Simon Duffy; I. Philosophy’s Mathematical Condition; 2. What is Post-Cantorian Thought? Transfinitude and the Conditions of Philosophy, Tzuchien Tho; 3. The Set-Theoretical Nature of Badiou’s Ontology and Lautman’s Dialectic of Problematic Ideas, Sean Bowden; 4. Badiou’s Platonism: The Mathematical Ideas of Post-Cantorian Set-Theory, Simon Duffy; 5. Sets, Categories and Topoi: Approaches to Ontology in Badiou’s Later Work, Anindya Bhattacharyya; II. Philosophical Notions and Orientations; 6. The Black Sheep of Materialism: The Theory of the Subject, Ed Pluth; 7. A Critique of Alain Badiou’s Denial of Time in his Philosophy of Events, James Williams; 8. Doing without Ontology: A Quinean Pragmatist Approach to Badiou, Talia Morag; 9. Towards a New Political Subject? Badiou between Marx and Althusser, Nina Power; III. Philosophical Figures; 10. ‘The Greatest of Our Dead’: Badiou and Lacan, Justin Clemens & Adam J. Bartlett; 11. Badiou and Sartre: Freedom, from Imagination to Chance, Brian A. Smith; 12. Badiou’s Relation to Heidegger in Theory of the Subject, Graham Harman; 13. One Divides into Two: Badiou’s Critique of Deleuze, Jon Roffe; Bibliography; Index.

This anthology participates in a shift in the scholarship surrounding Badiou’s work: beyond enthusiasm and polemic, the ground now opened, scholars sound the complexity of the oeuvre, reveal its intricate articulation of mathematics and ontology, and discover its peculiar capacity to generate, beyond commentary, new philosophical investigations.