1001Philosophers

Alain Badiou Quotes on Knowledge

Alain Badiou is a French philosopher, a former student of Louis Althusser, and one of the leading figures of post-Maoist French philosophy. This page collects quotes attributed to Alain Badiou on the topic of knowledge, drawn from across the philosopher's works.

Quotes

  • “Mathematics is ontology.”

    Introduction
  • Attributed to Alain Badiou:

    “Truth is what punches a hole in knowledge.”

  • “Meditation One: The One and the Multiple: a priori conditions of any possible ontology”

    Since its Parmenidean organization, ontology has built the portico of its ruined temple out of the following experience: what presents itself is essentially multiple; what presents itself is essentially one. The reciprocity of the one and being is certainly the inaugural axiom of philosophy - Leibniz formulation is excellent; 'What is not a being is not a being' - yet it is also its impasse; an im
  • “We find ourselves on the brink of a decision, a decision to break with the arcana of the one and the multiple in which philosophy is born and buried, phoenix of its own sophistic consumption.”

    Meditation One: The One and the Multiple: a priori conditions of any possible ontology
  • “Meditation One: The One and the Multiple: a priori conditions of any possible ontology”

    We find ourselves on the brink of a decision, a decision to break with the arcana of the one and the multiple in which philosophy is born and buried, phoenix of its own sophistic consumption.
  • “Everything turns on mastering the gap between the presupposition (that must be rejected) of a being of the one and the thesis of its 'there is'.”

    Meditation One: The One and the Multiple: a priori conditions of any possible ontology
  • “Meditation One: The One and the Multiple: a priori conditions of any possible ontology”

    Everything turns on mastering the gap between the presupposition (that must be rejected) of a being of the one and the thesis of its 'there is'.
  • “Chapter One, "Does Man Exist?”

    According to the way it is generally used today, the term 'ethics' relates above all to the domain of human rights, 'the rights of man'- or, by derivation, the rights of living beings. We are supposed to assume the existence of a universally recognizable human subject possessing 'rights' that are in some sense natural: the right to live, to avoid abusive, to enjoy 'fundamental' liberties (of opini
  • “Chapter One, "Does Man Exist?”

    In the political domain, deprived of any collective politcal landmark, stripped of any notion of the 'meaning of History’; and no longer able to hope for or expect a social revolution, many intellectuals, along with much of public opinion, have been won over to the logic of a capitalist economy and a parliamentary democracy.