Badiou and Frege: A Continental Critique of Logical Form

Open Philosophy 1 (1):94-114 (2018)
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Abstract

Various critiques of important analytic thinkers made by Alain Badiou in the late 1960s have been largely overlooked by continental philosophers and entirely overlooked by analytic philosophers. This paper looks in detail at Badiou’s 1969 essay ‟Mark and Lack,” providing an exposition and clarification of his direct and sustained critique of Gottlob Frege’s supposed ideological philosophical commitments. Badiou’s intellectual context is analyzed in some detail, not only explaining his theoretical debt to his then-master Louis Althusser, but also clarifying his understandings of the notions of ‟the scientific” and ‟the ideological” in light of the projects of Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem. A philosophical exposition of Badiou’s point-by-point critique of Frege’s conception of logic follows. Finally, the paper concludes with an analysis of the more general relevance of Badiou’s half-century-old critiques in light of developments in contemporary analytic metaphysics, especially those indebted to W. V. O. Quine and Donald Davidson. In essence, Davidson’s Fregean reconfiguration of Tarski’s work on truth places contemporary analytic metaphysics within the scope of what Badiou directly criticizes. It is suggested that Badiou’s critique find a place in discussions of analytic metaphysics.

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Joseph M. Spencer
University of New Mexico

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References found in this work

Two Dogmas of Empiricism.Willard V. O. Quine - 1951 - Philosophical Review 60 (1):20–43.
The semantic conception of truth and the foundations of semantics.Alfred Tarski - 1943 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 4 (3):341-376.
On what there is.Willard Van Orman Quine - 1948 - Review of Metaphysics 2 (5):21-38.
Truth.Michael Dummett - 1959 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 59 (1):141-62.
On concept and object.Gottlob Frege - 1892 - Mind 60 (238):168-180.

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