I picked up a copy of Alain Badiou's text, Infinite Thought: truth and the return to philosophy, yesterday afternoon from the Dark Horsey bookshop at the EAF in Adelaide. It was the 'return to philosophy' that caught my eye, not the 'infinite thought.'

Reurn to philosophy from what? From the modernist obsession with science? From its gradual elimination in the corporate university? Glancing through the text I noticed that it it places itself in opposition to the contemporary reduction of philosophy to nothing but a matter of language by poststructuralism, and the premature announcements of the end of philosophy by both the Heideggerians and the scientistic analytic philosophers.

A return to what kind of philosophy? Badiou sets himself against both analytic and continental modes of philosophy, and puts the traditional Platonic concerns of philosophy, truth, and being into play against the modern sophists of postmodernism. He sees mathematics as ontology and so his return to philosophy is to a systematic one based on the axioms of set theory.

Badiou should appeal to those modernists obsessed with academic postmodernism and in love with system. An article introducing Badiou over at Polygraph, which concentrates on the mathematical ontology. The link is courtesy of a Gauche