期刊名称：Philosophical Frontiers : A Journal of Emerging Thought
印刷版ISSN：1758-1532
电子版ISSN：1758-1540
出版年度：2008
卷号：3
期号：01
出版社：Progressive Frontiers Press
摘要：In this article I offer some perspectives on the work of Alain Badiou,
a thinker whose sheer ambitiousness and speculative range have perhaps conspired
against his achieving wider recognition amongst Anglophone, analytically trained
philosophers. Badiou’s thinking is remarkable chiefly for taking so strong and
principled a stand against just about every major direction of the present-day
philosophic tide. He has affirmed the absolute priority of ontology over
epistemology, truth over knowledge, knowledge over the means or mode of its
linguistic representation, and the claim of mathematics as prima philosophia over
those of various currently favoured rival candidates. This involves a far-reaching
conception of set theory and its ontological bearings, one that – if valid – bids fair
to redefine the very terms and conditions of rational enquiry across the whole range
of the natural and social or human sciences. Badiou starts out from a rigorous
distinction between being and event, or ontology and that which exceeds or disrupts
the existing ontological order. Such episodes occur through the advent of some
wholly unprecedented claim on the allegiance of subjects – whether scientists,
artists, political activists, or ethical agents – who most clearly perceive its challenge
and who resolve to pursue its implications to the utmost of their intellectual,
creative or investigative powers. Thus Badiou sees the constant extension and
refinement of set-theoretical concepts from Cantor to the present as an objectlesson
in the way that knowledge typically accrues through successive encounters
with a limit on its present-best powers of rational comprehension. This sense of
falling-short, or presumptive anomaly, in turn provides the impetus that ‘forces’
thought (through a formal operation that Badiou lays out in precisely specified settheoretical
terms) to move beyond its current, restricted stage of development and
achieve what was hitherto a strictly inconceivable advance. As well as describing
these technical aspects of his work in philosophy of mathematics, logic and the formal sciences I explain – for the benefit of those trained up in the more
compartmentalized mindset of analytic philosophy – how these aspects relate to
Badiou’s thinking in the fields of ethics, politics, aesthetics, and psychoanalysis.
Above all I stress his singular capacity to combine the most adventurous and wideranging
forays into realms of speculative thought with the highest degree of
conceptual rigour and logical precision.
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