Covering Part 3 of Alain Badiou’s Being and Event on “Nature & Infinity,” Alex and Andrew complete the "arithmetic, natural story" that constitutes Badiou’s presentation of being within the book so far.

Guest Sarah Pourciau explores the history and philosophy of set theory, while also scrutinizing the conclusions Badiou tries to draw from it. Pourciau is a professor of German Studies at Duke University. Her expertise includes 19th Century German thought, including both philosophy and mathematics (Dedekind, Cantor). She is the author of the book The Writing of Spirit: Soul, System, and the Roots of Language Science.

Concepts on Nature and Infinity

Political Modernism, Math as the Difference between Real and Natural Numbers, Martin Heidegger’s Poetic Ontology, Jacques Lacan’s Matheme, Physis, Nature, Natural Multiples, the Non-existence of Nature, Cardinality and Ordinality, Ordinal Chain, Infinity and Finitude, Arithmetic and Natural Infinity, Georg Cantor and Richard Dedekind, Five Critiques of GWF Hegel’s Notion of Infinity.

Interview with Sarah Pourciau

Digital Ocean, Richard Dedekind, Platonic Eidos, Georg Cantor and the Abyss, Gender and “The Feminine,” Kantian Intuition, Logos and the Origin of Set Theory, Politics, Naming and Numbers, Spontaneity, Différance, Alan Turing and Kurt Gödel, Computability.

Links

Pourciau profile, https://scholars.duke.edu/person/sarah.pourciau

Pourciau, The Writing of Spirit: Soul, System, and the Roots of Language Science, https://www.fordhampress.com/9780823275632/the-writing-of-spirit/

Pourciau, "A/logos: An Anomalous Episode in the History of Number," https://muse.jhu.edu/article/728110

Pourciau, "On the Digital Ocean," https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/717319