Parmenides - (Seminars of Alain Badiou) by Alain Badiou (Hardcover)

About the Book

Alain Badiou's 1985 seminar on Parmenides initiated his ongoing dialogue with the pre-Socratic philosopher and set out some of the foundational ideas of his own major philosophical works, including Being and Event.

Book Synopsis

Alain Badiou's 1985 seminar on Parmenides initiated his ongoing dialogue with the pre-Socratic philosopher and set out some of the foundational ideas of his own major philosophical works, including Being and Event. The seminar provides both a new understanding of the importance of Parmenides in establishing the fundamental terms of philosophy and a vital account of the intimate relationship between philosophy and mathematics.

For Badiou, Parmenides inaugurates the history of philosophy by linking being, thinking, and nonbeing in a "Borromean knot"--a linkage in which the relationship between any two terms requires the mediation of a third. Badiou traces the permutations of this connection among fundamental concepts as it was transmitted to later thinkers, including Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hegel, and Heidegger. He also argues that Parmenides's account of philosophy establishes a new kind of formal reasoning that, like mathematics, breaks with the Greek mythic and poetic traditions and their assumption that truth derives from sensory experience. This seminar demonstrates Badiou's unparalleled ability to recast the fundamental questions of philosophy.

Review Quotes

A tour de force of closely argued reasoning and an accessible prelude to Being and Event, Badiou's seminar rewrites the history of philosophy and reformulates its essential task. Badiou's brilliance and originality shine through on every page.--James I. Porter, author of The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece: Matter, Sensation, and Experience

Alain Badiou's Parmenides seminar locates the origin of philosophy in Parmenides' interweaving of being, nonbeing, and thinking. In their lucid and accessible translation, Susan Spitzer and Kenneth Reinhard reveal how Parmenides breaks with narrative accounts, founding philosophy on logic and inspiring Plato and his successors to ground thought in being.--Daniel W. Graham, author of The Texts of Early Greek Philosophy: The Complete Fragments and Selected Testimonies of the Major Presocratics

Badiou's seminars provide breathtaking insight into the conceptual workshop of one of the greatest philosophers of our times, and his seminar on Parmenides is perhaps the most outstanding of all. Badiou presents Parmenides as a thinker who for the first time proposed a break with tradition in order to inaugurate thought solely based on a mathematical knot. This book is essential reading in its dazzling trajectory from the origins of philosophy to its most pressing current concerns.--Mladen Dolar, University of Ljubljana

About the Author

Alain Badiou is one of the most important philosophers of our time. He is emeritus professor of philosophy at the École normale supérieure in Paris. His seminars published by Columbia University Press include Images of the Present Time (2023) and The One: Descartes, Plato, Kant (2023).

Susan Spitzer is a frequent translator of Badiou's works.

Kenneth Reinhard is research professor of comparative literature and English at the University of California, Los Angeles.