> At 05:41 PM 8/5/2009, Jeffrey Fisher wrote:
>
>> btw, was this one ever posted to this list? i kept thinking of it in the
>> badiou thread, but never got around to tracking it down until i found
>> myself
>> on xkcd today.
>>
>> http://xkcd.com/435/
>>
>
>
> ha. that's what I was wondering about. is this where badiou is coming from?
>
> the sociology stick figure should be turned, facing them all, making a fuck
> you, suck my cock hip movement at all of them, with a bubble expressing the
> words, "suck it, u lusers." :)
>
> shag
>
>
lol. that seems . . . appropriate. :)
as for whether this is where badiou is coming from or not, i hesitate to pronounce on that, but i think i would have to say, yes . . . sort of. he certainly believes that part of the job, the key job, of philosophy, is to attain to universality, even while it has to account for the individuals to which a universal property (or whtever) applies. he eschews the difference ethics of someone like levinas, for example. and this for him is where set theory comes in. he defines the universal precisely in terms of set theory. i can't say much more than that yet, because i haven't nailed down my set theory well enough yet to be sure i understand how it works. (i came to math in philosophy late, folks. sorry.)
but he is also clearly trying to dodge the problems of the kantian attempt to forge a universal ethics. although . . . it occurs to me to wonder what precisely badiou has to say about the idea of the synthetic a priori. which would be pertinent here. maybe eric or someone else who's plowed through it will know off-hand, but if it's come up in anything i've read so far, it hasn't registered. i will have to go back and look at that.
i am sort of working on a paper on dionysius the areopagite, badiou, and rorty. if anything comes of it, i'll let you know. :)
j
and i think i am maybe starting to post again at http://brainmortgage.blogspot.com/, although i hesitate to mislead on that score . . . lol