Who can tell? Not me, that’s for sure. Except: one thing he has accomplished is made me interested in formal notation for the first time ever, or at least since I was at all interested in math in high school.
I took logic as part of my philosophy degree but wasn’t into the class because I found formal notation off putting, and I had a pretty major depression at the time. But now…! I want to do logic! Or at least have discussions using abbreviations. Sometimes anyway. This is because of Badiou. And because of re-reading Marx in the past year-ish, all those formulas.
I don’t have the time to devote to this really but it’d do me some good (at a minimum, good 4 my discipline) to work through the logic textbooks I have. This site might be of some use. If nothing else the interactive diagrams are neat.
The front page of that site states that
“Meaning is exclusion” which means that “language can never point out anything specifically, only eliminate sets of possibilities (”possible worlds” for the modern philosopher or logician) from our consideration. That is, language - and therefore logic - can only say what isn’t the case. And that no matter how many possibilities were excluded by language, i.e., how specific our language, an infinite number would still remain (a now well-known property of infinite sets.) If, for example, we say that a friend of ours has red hair, someone listening to us knows that our friend doesn’t have black or light blonde colored hair, but not what precise shade, of all the infinite shades of red that are possible, their hair is. Nor do they know from what we’ve said how tall, or heavy, or witty our friend is. The possibilities are still infinite.”
This relates to some stuff I’ll put up here soon from Hallward’s book on Badiou. So far I’ve only read the intro and some of the appendix on intro to set theory. I’ve found the latter really helpful and interesting (perhaps in part because of my low level of literacy - numeracy? with formal systems).
See also “determination is negation” in Spinoza, Hegel, Marx at these links, respectively.
http://bdsweb.tripod.com/en/letters.htm
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel/
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/intro-f.htm
Comment by Nate — April 3, 2007 @ 6:03 am
I’ve faced a similar issue moving from sociology into an economics department for my PhD… all the maths! and I hadn’t done any since high school. But gradually I’ve come to enjoy it, it even feels like a break to move from reading and writing to do some maths probs. I’ve also moved from seeing maths as an obfuscation or false simplification of social reality to seeing it as a useful tool of abstraction. But still my knowledge is only good enough to understand journal articles, constructing my own models is much more difficult.
Comment by Mike Beggs — April 3, 2007 @ 6:28 am
Other Badiou posts, listed here for ease of indexing -
http://whatinthehell.blogsome.com/2005/12/20/is-a-set/
http://whatinthehell.blogsome.com/2006/01/12/is-alains-deal-with-paul/
http://whatinthehell.blogsome.com/2006/01/13/is-alains-deal-with-paul-2/
http://whatinthehell.blogsome.com/2006/11/07/is-the-future-anterior/
http://whatinthehell.blogsome.com/2007/04/03/is-null-set-sameness/
http://whatinthehell.blogsome.com/2007/05/09/do-kant-and-badiou-have-to-do-with-each-other/
Comment by Nate — May 9, 2008 @ 4:03 am