So, since there seems to be a lot of people banging on about how great Badiou is, and here's me not even heard of him, when I came across the introduction to "Logics of Worlds" in Radical Philosophy the other week (the article was called "Democratic Materialism and the Materialist Dialectic"), I thought I'd read it. I thought it was interesting enough to read with my reading group..
Has anyone else read this?
I have several questions/problems with his "materialist dialectic" - I'm having trouble making sense of the idea that "truths exist as an exception to what there is" and "there isn't only what there is".
His statement of "materialist dialectic" is - "there are only bodies and languages, except that there are also truths".
It seems a rather odd use of the term dialectic, by which, he claims, "we should understand that the essence of all difference is the third term that marks the gap between two others" - I think that seems like a rather poor understanding of Hegel's conception of dialectic.
He goes on to find support for his idea in Descartes, of all people, where he finds a quote from the Principles of Philosophy that common-or-garden dualism is "subordinate to a more fundamental distinction", i.e. that between things with existence, on one hand, and truths, on the other.
Unfortunately, his whole argument seems undermined by the fact that the bit of Descartes he quotes actually says that this distinction is about things that fall into human knowledge, it is epistemological rather than ontolgical.
Anyone else care to comment, or help me understand this better?
Has anyone else read this?
I have several questions/problems with his "materialist dialectic" - I'm having trouble making sense of the idea that "truths exist as an exception to what there is" and "there isn't only what there is".
His statement of "materialist dialectic" is - "there are only bodies and languages, except that there are also truths".
It seems a rather odd use of the term dialectic, by which, he claims, "we should understand that the essence of all difference is the third term that marks the gap between two others" - I think that seems like a rather poor understanding of Hegel's conception of dialectic.
He goes on to find support for his idea in Descartes, of all people, where he finds a quote from the Principles of Philosophy that common-or-garden dualism is "subordinate to a more fundamental distinction", i.e. that between things with existence, on one hand, and truths, on the other.
Unfortunately, his whole argument seems undermined by the fact that the bit of Descartes he quotes actually says that this distinction is about things that fall into human knowledge, it is epistemological rather than ontolgical.
Anyone else care to comment, or help me understand this better?