Badiou's conceptualization of mathematics

Abstract

The reconsideration of the relationship between philosophy and mathematics cannot ignore the theory of the contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou. The basic thesis and the starting point of L'être et l'événement, Badiou's work which interests us here mostly and in which he has laid down the foundations of his philosophical project, is that mathematics is the science of being qua being. Badiou claims that mathematics is ontology. What interests us here is the question of the place, extent and consequences of this thesis concerning Badiou's own philosophical system as well as the relationship between philosophy and mathematics. Ontology is not the goal of Badiou's theory, while on the other hand mathematics is (only) one of the four conditions of philosophy. The relationship between philosophy and the four procedures of truth is not the relationship of “domination, subsumption, foundation or guarantor”. The tasks of philosophy is not to create its conditions, to overlap with them, but to invent and present the frame of their compossibility.