Dilemmas Of Truth In Alain Badiou S Philosophy

This book on Alain Badiou's philosophy begins with a central theme: the attempt to trace how Badiou has replaced the tradition of critical theory and negation with an affirmative support of his four generic procedures (art, science, love, and art) as inseparable from his revitalization of both the subject and the concept of truth. By defining four procedures as conditions of philosophy, Badiou makes the attempt to establish each as inter-related and systematically necessary to make a new proposal for thought. The fidelity to Badiou's project for the 21st century, however, requires a fundamental examination: are his four truths complicated by an inescapable dilemma? And if so, can the four truths be retained, as a whole, or does the individual reader have to make a decision that will alter Badiou's project and conclusions? By presenting the dilemmas of his thought, the scholarly reader will be in a position to then pursue the necessary study to come to their own conclusions and, by doing so, become sufficiently free to resist the many coercions of social and political life in liberal democracies today. Giosuè Ghisalberti is Professor of Philosophy at Humber College, Toronto, Canada. His interests in the last decade have focused on the classical world of Judaism, Greece, Rome, and Christianity. Future work will complement the ancients with attention to modern thinkers. His most recent publication is Nietzsche and the Self-Revelations of a Martyr.

This book on Alain Badiou’s philosophy begins with a central theme: the attempt to trace how Badiou has replaced the tradition of critical theory and negation with an affirmative support of his four generic procedures (art, science, love, and art) as inseparable from his revitalization of both the subject and the concept of truth. By defining four procedures as conditions of philosophy, Badiou makes the attempt to establish each as inter-related and systematically necessary to make a new proposal for thought. The fidelity to Badiou’s project for the 21st century, however, requires a fundamental examination: are his four truths complicated by an inescapable dilemma? And if so, can the four truths be retained, as a whole, or does the individual reader have to make a decision that will alter Badiou’s project and conclusions? By presenting the dilemmas of his thought, the scholarly reader will be in a position to then pursue the necessary study to come to their own conclusions and, by doing so, become sufficiently free to resist the many coercions of social and political life in liberal democracies today.

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The Being and Event trilogy is the philosophical basis of Alain Badiou's entire oeuvre. It is formed of three major texts, which constitute a kind of metaphysical saga: Being and Event (1988). ), Logics of the Worlds (2006) and finally The Immanence of Truths, which he has been working on for 15 years. The new volume reverses the perspective adopted in Logics of Worlds. Where in that book, Badiou saw fit to analyze how truths, qua events, appear from the perspective of particular worlds that by definition exclude them, in The Immanence of Truths Badiou asks instead how the irruption of truths transforms the worlds within which they by necessity must arise. An emphasis on regularity and continuity has given way to an attempt, one unquestionable in its philosophical power and implications, to formalize rupture and reconfiguration. The Being and Event trilogy is a unique and ambitious work that reveals how truths can be at once context-specific and universal, situational and eternal.

Alain Badiou is one of the world's most influential living philosophers. Few contemporary thinkers display his breadth of argument and reference, or his ability to intervene in debates critical to both analytic and continental philosophy. Alain Badiou: Key Concepts presents an overview of and introduction to the full range of Badiou's thinking. Essays focus on the foundations of Badiou's thought, his "key concepts" - truth, being, ontology, the subject, and conditions - and on his engagement with a range of thinkers central to his philosophy, including Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Heidegger and Deleuze.

Alain Badiou is arguably the most original and influential philosopher working in France today. Working against the tide of postmodern orthodoxy, Badiou revitalizes philosophy's perennial attempt to provide a systematic theory of truth. Theoretical Writings presents, in Badiou's own words, 'the theoretical core of [his] Philosophy'. Beginning with the controversial assertion that ontology is mathematics, the chapters step the reader through his key concepts of being, subject and truth via startling re-readings of canonical figures including Spinoza, Kant and Hegel and engagements with poetry, psychoanalysis and radical politics. Theoretical Writings is an indispensable introduction to one of the great thinkers of our time.

Badiou is widely considered to be France's most important and exciting contemporary thinker. Much of Badiou's earlier work (including Being and Event) can only be fully understood with a clear grasp of Theory of the Subject, one of his most important works.