All posts filed under: logic

Badiou on Logic

Saturday, July 5, 2008
by Taylor Adkins
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badiou / godel / logic / mathematics / metamathematics / ontology

Stellar cartographies has translated two different selections of course notes from Badiou’s lectures circa 1980-82 here and here. This translation is short, but extremely concise, so there’s a lot of material to absorb. In particular, the notes help to explain Godel’s achievement and his theorem and offers good insight into Badiou’s own mathematico-ontological project. Definitely check it out for a quick read on a slightly neglected aspect of this philosopher’s expanding corpus. Also be sure […]

Counter-mythology

Wednesday, June 4, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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being / event / face / gift / infinity / lacan / language / levinas / logic / machine / silence / turbulence / violence

Responsibility is what first enables one to catch sight of and conceive of value. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being 123 Beyond the question of being and non-being, language is not the event — but rather a process of assembling unformed and unspecified elements, an abstract machinics which imagines new forms for itself by correlating the various distinct orders of reality with a plane of consistency in which a unified vision becomes possible — in short uncovering […]

The Language Mechanism: Notes on de Saussure

Wednesday, February 6, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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continuity / diachrony / evolution / institution / language / linearity / linguistics / logic / sign / synchrony / time

A language thus has this curious and striking feature. It has no immediately perceptible entities. And yet one cannot doubt that they exist, or that the interplay of these units is what constitutes linguistic structure. That is undoubtedly a characteristic which distinguishes languages from all other semiological institutions. Ferdinand de Saussure (Course in General Linguistics, 105) After having investigated the physiological mechanisms of speech, Saussure turns to consider the nature of linguistic signs. In his […]

Science and Parasites: Michel Serres and the Unification of Human and Natural Sciences

Wednesday, November 14, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
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banquet / communication / epistemology / fractal / history / humanities / information / interruption / logic / matter / michel serres / narcissism / ontology / parasite / physics / power / relation / Science / Mathematics / Technology / Serres / symmetry / time / topology / turbulence

Theorem: the history of science obeys the law of diminishing returns. The first attack on the narcissism of science… Second: if we examine the set made of the problem and of the actions that transform it, there is no doubt that it is, at the beginning, more complex than the thing itself or the process. Clearer perhaps, yet more complicated. The question can then be reexamined in order to try to illuminate this new complexity […]

Imaginary

Tuesday, October 2, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
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difference / flux / God / image / imaginary / individuation / insanity / logic / metaphysics / symmetry / void

Wild Magic of the Unbeliever (Dave Makin) How much of our lives are caught up, inextricably, with the imaginary? A dangerous question only because it is silly, and stupid; why? Because it’s answer is both simple and impossible. For we know: none of it is imaginary, it is all real; and we also know: nothing is real, all of it is imaginary. A dangerous idea, a poisonous idea: there is contradiction at the origin. An […]