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Process philosophy (or ontology of becoming) identifies metaphysical reality with change and development. Since the time of Plato and Aristotle, philosophers have posited true reality as "timeless", based on permanent substances, whilst processes are denied or subordinated to timeless substances. If Socrates changes, becoming sick, Socrates is still the same (the substance of Socrates being the same), and change (his sickness) only glides over his substance: change is accidental, whereas the substance is essential. Therefore, classic ontology denies any full reality to change, which is conceived as only accidental and not essential. This classical ontology is what made knowledge and a theory of knowledge possible, as it was thought that a science of something in becoming was an impossible feat to achieve.^[1]

In opposition to the classical model of change as purely accidental and illusory (as by Aristotle), process philosophy regards change as the cornerstone of reality–the cornerstone of the Being thought as Becoming. Modern philosophers who appeal to process rather than substance include Heidegger, Charles Peirce, Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, Arran Gare and Nicholas Rescher. In physics Ilya Prigogine^[2] distinguishes between the "physics of being" and the "physics of becoming". Process philosophy covers not just scientific intuitions and experiences, but can be used as a conceptual bridge to facilitate discussions among religion, philosophy, and science.^[3]

History[link]

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In Ancient Greek thought[link]

The formal development of this theory begins with Heraclitus's fragments in which he posits the nous, the ground of Becoming, as agon, or "strife of opposites" as the underlying basis of all reality defined by change. That balance and conflict were the foundations of change and stability in the flux of existence.

Twentieth century[link]

In early twentieth century philosophy of mathematics, it was undertaken to develop mathematics as an airtight axiomatic system, in which every truth could be derived logically from a set of axioms. In the foundations of mathematics, this project is variously understood as logicism or as part of the formalist program of David Hilbert. Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell attempted to complete, or at least greatly facilitate, this program with their seminal book Principia Mathematica, which purported to build a logically consistent set theory on which to found mathematics. This project may have been ultimately defeasible, and afterwards Whitehead intuited that the entire venture was an organ of an overarching ontological mistake. He saw that science and mathematics were struggling to overcome an ontology of substances, and thus could not engage phenomena whose nature are more properly understood as 'process'. This resulted in the most famous work of process philosophy, Alfred North Whitehead's Process and Reality^[4], 1929, a work which continues that begun by Hegel but describing a more complex and fluid dynamic ontology.

Process thought describes truth as "movement" in and through determinates (Hegelian truth), rather than describing these determinates as fixed concepts or "things" (Aristotelian truth). Since Whitehead, process thought is distinguished from Hegel in that it describes entities which arise or coalesce in becoming, rather than being simply dialectically determined from prior posited determinates. These entities are referred to as complexes of occasions of experience. It is also distinguished in being not necessarily conflictual or oppositional in operation. Process may be integrative, destructive or both together, allowing for aspects of interdependence, influence, and confluence, and addressing coherence in universal as well as particular developments, which aspects are not condign to Hegel's system. Additionally, instances of determinate occasions of experience, while always ephemeral, are nonetheless seen as important to define the type and continuity of those occasions of experience that flow from or relate to them.

[edit] Whitehead's Process and Reality

Whitehead's background was an unusual one for a speculative metaphysician. Educated as a mathematician, he became, through his coauthorship and 1913 publication of Principia Mathematica with Bertrand Russell, a major logician. Later he wrote extensively on physics and its philosophy, proposing a theory of gravity in Minkowski space as a logically possible alternative Einstein's general theory of relativity. He was conversant with the quantum mechanics that emerged in the 1920s.^{[citation needed]} Whitehead did not begin teaching and writing on process and metaphysics until he joined Harvard at 63 years of age.^{[citation needed]}

In Whitehead's Science and the Modern World (1925), he noted that the human intuitions and experiences of science, aesthetics, ethics, and religion influence the worldview of a community, but that in the last several centuries science dominates Western culture. Whitehead sought a holistic, comprehensive cosmology that provides a systematic descriptive theory of the world which can be used for the diverse human intuitions gained through ethical, aesthetic, religious, and scientific experiences, and not just the scientific.^[3]

Whitehead's influences were not restricted to philosophers or physicists or mathematicians. He was influenced by the French philosopher Henri-Louis Bergson (1859–1941), who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927. Process philosophy is also believed to have influenced some 20th century modernists, such as D. H. Lawrence, William Faulkner and Charles Olson.^{[citation needed]}

Process metaphysics[link]

The process metaphysics elaborated in Process and Reality^[5] posits an ontology which is based on the two kinds of existence of entity, that of actual entity and that of abstract entity or abstraction.

The ultimate abstract principle of actual existence for Whitehead is creativity. It is manifest in what can be called 'singular causality'. This term may be contrasted with the term 'nomic causality'. An example of singular causation is that I woke this morning because my alarm clock rang. An example of nomic causation is that alarm clocks generally wake people in the morning. Aristotle recognizes singular causality as efficient causality. For Whitehead, there are many contributory singular causes for an event. A further contributory singular cause of my being awoken by my alarm clock this morning was that I was lying asleep near it till it rang.

An actual entity is a general philosophical term for an utterly determinate and completely concrete individual particular of the actually existing world or universe of changeable entities considered in terms of singular causality, about which categorical statements can be made. Whitehead's most far-reaching and profound and radical contribution to metaphysics is his invention of a better way of choosing the actual entities. Whitehead chooses a way of defining the actual entities that makes them all alike, qua actual entities, with a single exception.

For example, for Aristotle, the actual entities were the substances, such as Socrates and Bucephalus. Besides Aristotle's ontology of substances, another example of an ontology that posits actual entities is in the monads of Leibniz, which are said to be 'windowless'.

Whitehead's actual entities[link]

For Whitehead, actual entities are of two kinds, temporal and atemporal.

With one exception, all actual entities for Whitehead are temporal and are occasions of experience (which are not to be confused with consciousness). An entity that people commonly think of as a simple concrete object, or that Aristotle would think of as a substance, is, in this ontology, considered to be a comoposite of indefinitely many occasions of experience. A human being is thus composed of indefinitely many occasions of experience.

The one exceptional actual entity for Whitehead is at once both temporal and atemporal: God. He is objectively immortal, as well as being immanent in the world. He is objectified in each temporal actual entity; but He is not an eternal object.

According to Whitehead, the occasions of experience are of four grades. The first grade comprises processes in a physical vacuum such as the propagation of an electromagnetic wave or gravitational influence across empty space. The occasions of experience of the second grade involve just inanimate matter. The occasions of experience of the third grade involve living organisms. Occasions of experience of the fourth grade involve experience in the mode of presentational immediacy, which means more or less what are often called the qualia of subjective experience. So far as we know, experience in the mode of presentational immediacy occurs in only more evolved animals. That some occasions of experience involve experience in the mode of presentational immediacy is the one and only reason why Whitehead makes the occasions of experience his actual entities; for the actual entities must be of the ultimately general kind. Consequently, it is inessential that an occasion of experience have an aspect in the mode of presentational immediacy; occasions in the grades one, two, and three, lack that aspect.

There is no mind-matter duality in this ontology, because "mind" is simply seen as an abstraction from an occasion of experience which has also a material aspect, which is of course simply another abstraction from it; thus the mental aspect and the material aspect are abstractions from one and the same concrete occasion of experience. The brain is part of the body, both being abstractions of a kind known as persistent physical objects, neither being actual entities. Though not recognized by Aristotle, there is biological evidence, written about by Galen,^[6] that the human brain is an essential seat of human experience in the mode of presentational immediacy. We may say that the brain has a material and a mental aspect, all three being abstractions from their indefinitely many constitutive occasions of experience, which are actual entities.

Inherent in each actual entity is its respective dimension of time. Potentially, each Whiteheadean occasion of experience is causally consequential on every other occasion of experience that precedes it in time, and has as its causal consequences every other occasion of experience that follows it in time; thus it has been said that Whitehead's occasions of experience are 'all window', in contrast to Leibniz's 'windowless' monads. In time defined relative to it, each occasion of experience is causally influenced by prior occasions of experiences, and causally influences future occasions of experience. An occasion of experience consists of a process of prehending other occasions of experience, reacting to them. This is the process in process philosophy.

Such process is never deterministic. Consequently, free will is essential and inherent to the universe.

The causal outcomes obey the usual well-respected rule that the causes precede the effects in time. Some pairs of processes cannot be connected by cause-and-effect relations, and they are said to be spatially separated. This in perfect agreement with the viewpoint of the Einstein theory of special relativity and with the Minkowski geometry of spacetime.^[7] It is clear that Whitehead respected these ideas, as may be seen for example in his 1919 book An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge^[8] as well as in Process and Reality. Time in this view is relative to an inertial reference frame, different reference frames defining different versions of time.

The actual entities of Whitehead, the occasions of experience, are logically atomic in the sense that an occasion of experience cannot be cut into two other occasions of experience. This kind of logical atomicity is perfectly compatible with indefinitely many spatio-temporal overlaps of occasions of experience.

This is because occasions of experience have some topological character, expressed in Whitehead's theory of extension. Fundamental to both Newtonian and to quantum theoretical mechanics is the concept of velocity. The measurement of a velocity requires a finite spatiotemporal extent. Because it has no finite spatiotemporal extent, a single point of Minkowski space cannot be an occasion of experience, but is an abstraction from an infinite set of occasions of experience, as explained in Process and Reality^[5]. Whitehead did not define the topology of his actual entities in modern terms, but it seems that he envisaged them as convex compact or 'oval' sets in Minkowski space. The open sets of the path topology, explained by Naber^[7], cannot be occasions of experience because they are centred on a single spatially isolated point of an underlying Minkowski space in a way that makes them very far from 'oval'. In one view, the occasions of experience have a topology in which they are the open sets, each defined by two points with timelike separation in an underlying Minkowski space. The initial of the two points has a forward light cone and the final of them has a backward light cone; the intersection of these two light cones can be used as the extensive definition of an occasion of experience as an open set. Such an open set cannot be cut into two constituent open sets with the same structure, and that is the meaning of its atomicity. The essence here is that an occasion of experience comprises a finite extent of space time and can be the extensional 'receptacle' of a process. Though the occasions of experience are atomic, they are not necessarily separate in extension, spatiotemporally, from one another. Indefinitely many occasions of experience can overlap in Minkowski space. An example of a nexus of overlapping occasions of experience is what Whitehead calls an enduring physical object, which corresponds closely with an Aristotelian substance.

Another aspect of the atomicity of occasions of experience is that they do not change. An actual entity is what it is. An occasion of experience can be described as a process of change, but it is itself unchangeable.

Whitehead's abstractions[link]

An abstraction is an idea that involves more than one single actual entity. Whitehead's ontology refers to importantly structured collections of actual entities as nexuses of actual entities. Collection of actual entities into a nexus emphasizes some aspect of those entities, and that emphasis is an abstraction, because it means that some aspects of the actual entities are de-emphasized or dragged away from their actuality.

Whitehead admitted indefinitely many eternal objects. An example of an eternal object is a number, such as the number 'two'. Whitehead held that eternal objects are abstractions of a very high degree of abstraction. Many abstractions, including eternal objects, are potential ingredients of processes.

Causation and concrescence of a process[link]

For Whitehead, besides its temporal generation by the actual entities which are its contributory causes, a process may be considered as a concrescence of abstract ingredient eternal objects. God is ingredient in every temporal actual entity.

Relation between actual entities and abstractions stated in the ontological principle[link]

Whitehead's ontological principle is that whatever reality pertains to an abstraction is derived from the actual entities upon which it is founded or of which it is comprised.

Further aspects[link]

However, Whitehead is not an idealist in the strict sense. Whitehead's ideas were a significant development of the idea of panpsychism (also known as panexperientialism, because of Whitehead’s emphasis on experience).

Process philosophy, for some, gives God a special place in the universe of occasions of experience. God encompasses all the other occasions of experience but also transcends them; thus Whitehead embraces panentheism. Since, it is argued, free will is inherent to the nature of the universe, God is not omnipotent in Whitehead's metaphysics. God's role is to offer enhanced occasions of experience. God participates in the evolution of the universe by offering possibilities, which may be accepted or rejected. Whitehead's thinking here has given rise to process theology, whose prominent advocates include Charles Hartshorne, John B. Cobb, Jr., and Hans Jonas, who was also influenced by the non-theological philosopher Martin Heidegger. However, other process philosophers have questioned Whitehead's theology, seeing it as a regressive Platonism.

Whitehead enumerated three essential natures of God. The primordial nature of God consists of all potentialities of existence for actual occasions, which Whitehead dubbed eternal objects. God can offer possibilities by ordering the relevance of eternal objects. The consequent nature of God prehends everything that happens in reality. As such, God experiences all of reality in a sentient manner. The last nature is the superjective. This is the way in which God’s synthesis becomes a sense-datum for other actual entities. In some sense, God is prehended by existing actual entities.

Process philosophy since Whitehead[link]

Several fields of science and especially medicine seem to make liberal use of ideas in process philosophy, notably the theory of pain and healing of the late 20th century. The philosophy of medicine began to deviate somewhat from scientific method and an emphasis on repeatable results in the very late 20th century by embracing population thinking, and a more pragmatic approach to issues in public health, environmental health and especially mental health. In this latter field, R. D. Laing, Thomas Szasz and Michel Foucault were instrumental in moving medicine away from emphasis on "cures" and towards concepts of individuals in balance with their society, both of which are changing, and against which no benchmarks or finished "cures" were very likely to be measurable.

In psychology, the subject of imagination was again explored more extensively since Whitehead, and the question of feasibility or "eternal objects" of thought became central to the impaired theory of mind explorations that framed postmodern cognitive science. A biological understanding of the most eternal object, that being the emerging of similar but independent cognitive apparatus, led to an obsession with the process "embodiment", that being, the emergence of these cognitions. Like Whitehead's God, especially as elaborated in J. J. Gibson's perceptual psychology emphasizing affordances, by ordering the relevance of eternal objects (especially the cognitions of other such actors), the world becomes. Or, it becomes simple enough for human beings to begin to make choices, and to prehend what happens as a result. These experiences may be summed in some sense but can only approximately be shared, even among very similar cognitions with identical DNA. An early explorer of this view was Alan Turing who sought to prove the limits of expressive complexity of human genes in the late 1940s, to put bounds on the complexity of human intelligence and so assess the feasibility of artificial intelligence emerging. Since 2000, Process Psychology has progressed as an independent academic and therapeutic discipline.^[9]

In the philosophy of mathematics, some of Whitehead's ideas re-emerged in combination with cognitivism as the cognitive science of mathematics and embodied mind theses.

Somewhat earlier, exploration of mathematical practice and quasi-empiricism in mathematics from the 1950s to 1980s had sought alternatives to metamathematics in social behaviours around mathematics itself: for instance, Paul Erdős's simultaneous belief in Platonism and a single "big book" in which all proofs existed, combined with his personal obsessive need or decision to collaborate with the widest possible number of other mathematicians. The process, rather than the outcomes, seemed to drive his explicit behaviour and odd use of language, e.g., he called God the "Supreme Fascist", echoing the role Whitehead assigned, as if the synthesis of Erdős and collaborators in seeking proofs, creating sense-datum for other mathematicians, was itself the expression of a divine will. Certainly, Erdős behaved as if nothing else in the world mattered, including money or love, as emphasized in his biography The Man Who Loved Only Numbers.

In plant morphology, Rolf Sattler developed a process morphology (dynamic morphology) that overcomes the structure/process (or structure/function) dualism that is commonly taken for granted in biology. According to process morphology, structures such as leaves of plants do not have processes, they are processes.^[10][11]

See also[link]

• Alfred North Whitehead
• David Ray Griffin
• Dialectic
• Dialectical monism
• Elisionism
• Gilles Deleuze
• Holomovement
• Joseph A. Bracken
• Milič Čapek
• Process theology
• Wilmon Henry Sheldon

References[link]

External links[link]

• Whitehead Research Project
• Process philosophy entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy by Nicholas Rescher
• Process philosophy entry in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy by Jeremy R. Hustwit
• Chromatika website
• Process and Reality. Part V. Final Interpretation
• Wolfgang Sohst: Prozessontologie. Ein systematischer Entwurf der Entstehung von Existenz. (Berlin 2009)

Alfred North Whitehead, OM FRS^[1] (15 February 1861 – 30 December 1947) was an English mathematician who became a philosopher. He wrote on algebra, logic, foundations of mathematics, philosophy of science, physics, metaphysics, and education. Whitehead supervised the doctoral dissertations of Bertrand Russell and Willard Van Orman Quine, thus influencing logic and virtually all of analytic philosophy. He co-authored the epochal Principia Mathematica with Russell.

Life[link]

Whitehead was born in Ramsgate, Kent, England. Although his grandfather, Thomas Whitehead, was known for having founded Chatham House Academy, a fairly successful school for boys, Alfred North was educated at Sherborne School, Dorset, then considered the best public school in the country. His childhood was described as over-protected, but when at school he excelled in sports, mathematics and was head prefect of his class.

In 1880, Whitehead matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was fourth wrangler and gained his BA in 1884.^[2] Elected a fellow of Trinity in 1884, Whitehead would teach and write mathematics at the college until 1910, spending the 1890s writing his Treatise on Universal Algebra (1898), and the 1900s collaborating with his former pupil, Russell, on the first edition of Principia Mathematica.^[3]

In 1910, he resigned his position at Trinity College to protest the dismissal of a colleague because of an adulterous affair. He also ran afoul of a Cambridge by-law limiting the term of a Senior Lecturer to 25 years.

In 1890, Whitehead married Evelyn Wade, an Irish woman reared in France; they had a daughter and two sons. One son died in action while serving in the Royal Flying Corps during World War I. Meanwhile, Russell spent much of 1918 in prison because of his pacifist activities. Although Whitehead visited his co-author in prison, he did not take his pacifism seriously, while Russell sneered at Whitehead's later speculative Platonism and panpsychism.^{[further explanation needed]} After the war, Russell and Whitehead seldom interacted, and Whitehead did not contribute to the 1925 second edition of Principia Mathematica.

Whitehead was always interested in theology, especially in the 1890s. His family was firmly anchored in the Church of England: his father and uncles were vicars, while his brother would become Bishop of Madras. Perhaps influenced by his wife and the writings of Cardinal Newman, Whitehead leaned towards Roman Catholicism. Prior to World War I, he considered himself an agnostic. Later he returned to religion, without formally joining any church.

Concomitantly, Whitehead developed a keen interest in physics: his fellowship dissertation examined James Clerk Maxwell's views on electricity and magnetism. His outlook on mathematics and physics was more philosophical than purely scientific; he was more concerned about their scope and nature, rather than about particular tenets and theories.

He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1922 to 1923.

The period between 1910 and 1926 was mostly spent at University College London and Imperial College London, where he taught and wrote on physics, the philosophy of science, and the theory and practice of education. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society since 1903 and was elected to the British Academy in 1931. In physics, Whitehead articulated a rival doctrine to Einstein's general relativity. His theory of gravitation continues to be controversial. Even Tanaka, who suggests that G disagrees with experimental findings, admits that his work does not actually refute Whitehead's formulation.^[4] A more lasting work was his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919), a pioneering attempt to synthetize the philosophical underpinnings of physics. It has little influenced the course of modern physics, however.Also he is a great philosopher.

Whitehead's Presidential address in 1916 to the Mathematical Association of England The Aims of Education in the book of the same title (1929a) pointedly criticized the formalistic approach of modern British teachers who do not care about culture and self-education of their disciples: "Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it."

In 1924, Henry Osborn Taylor invited Whitehead, who was then 63, to implement his ideas and teach philosophy at Harvard University. This was a subject that fascinated Whitehead but was also one that he had also not previously studied or taught. The Whiteheads spent the rest of their lives in the United States. He retired from teaching in 1937. When he died in 1947 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S., there was no funeral, and his body was cremated.

Whitehead had opinions about a vast range of human endeavors. These opinions pepper the many essays and speeches he gave on various topics between 1915 and his death (1917, 1925a, 1927, 1929a, 1929b, 1933, 1938). His Harvard lectures (1924–37) are studded with quotations from his favourite poets, Wordsworth and Shelley. Most Sunday afternoons when they were in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Whiteheads hosted an open house to which all Harvard students were welcome, and during which talk flowed freely. Some of the obiter dicta Whitehead spoke on these occasions were recorded by Lucien Price, a Boston journalist, who published them in 1954. That book also includes a remarkable picture of Whitehead as the aged sage holding court. It was at one of these open houses that the young Harvard student B.F. Skinner credits a discussion with Whitehead as providing the inspiration for his work Verbal Behavior in which language is analyzed from a behaviorist perspective.^[5] Another student influenced by Whitehead was Charles Malik, the drafter of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’s preamble, and later president of the UN General Assembly. Malik wrote his PhD dissertation about Whitehead, in which Malik compared Whitehead’s Metaphysics of Time to that of Martin Heidegger .

A two volume biography was written by Victor Lowe (1985) and Lowe and Schneewind (1990); Lowe studied under Whitehead at Harvard. A comprehensive appraisal of Whitehead's work is difficult because Whitehead left no Nachlass; his family carried out his instructions that all of his papers be destroyed after his death. There is also no critical edition of Whitehead's writings.

Ideas[link]

The genesis of Whitehead's process philosophy may be attributed to his having witnessed the shocking collapse of Newtonian physics, due mainly to Albert Einstein's work. His metaphysical views emerged in The Concept of Nature (1920) and were expanded in Science and the Modern World (1925), also an important study in the history of ideas and the role of science and mathematics in the rise of Western civilization. Indebted to Henri Bergson's philosophy of change, Whitehead was also a Platonist who "saw the definite character of events as due to the "ingression" of timeless entities."^[6]

In 1927, Whitehead was asked to give the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh. These were published in 1929 as Process and Reality, the book that founded process philosophy, a major contribution to Western metaphysics. Proponents of process philosophy include Charles Hartshorne and Nicholas Rescher, and his ideas have been taken up by French philosophers Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze. In poetry, the work and thought of American Charles Olson was strongly influenced by Whitehead's concepts. Olson referred to him variously as "the cosmologist"^[7] and as the "constant companion of my poem."^[8]

Process and Reality is famous for its defense of theism, although Whitehead's God differs essentially from the revealed God of Abrahamic religions. Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism gave rise to process theology, thanks to Charles Hartshorne, John B. Cobb, Jr, and David Ray Griffin. Some Christians and Jews find process theology a fruitful way of understanding God and the universe. Just as the entire universe is in constant flow and change, God, as source of the universe, is viewed as growing and changing. Whitehead's rejection of mind-body dualism is similar to elements in traditions such as Buddhism.

The main tenets of Whitehead's metaphysics were summarized in his most accessible work, Adventures of Ideas (1933), where he also defines his conceptions of beauty, truth, art, adventure, and peace. He believed that "there are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil."^[9]

Whitehead's political views sometimes appear to be libertarian without the label. He wrote:

Now the intercourse between individuals and between social groups takes one of two forms, force or persuasion. Commerce is the great example of intercourse by way of persuasion. War, slavery, and governmental compulsion exemplify the reign of force.^[10]

On the other hand, many Whitehead scholars read his work as providing a philosophical foundation for the social liberalism of the New Liberal movement that was prominent throughout Whitehead's adult life. Morris wrote that "...there is good reason for claiming that Whitehead shared the social and political ideals of the new liberals."^[11]

Bibliography[link]

• 1898. A Treatise on Universal Algebra with Applications. Cambridge Uni. Press. 1960 reprint, Hafner.
• 1911. An Introduction to Mathematics. Oxford Univ. Press. 1990 paperback, ISBN 0-19-500211-3. Vol. 56 of the Great Books of the Western World series.
• 1917. The Organization of Thought Educational and Scientific. Lippincott.
• 1920. The Concept of Nature. Cambridge Uni. Press. 2004 paperback, Prometheus Books, ISBN 1-59102-214-2. Being the 1919 Tarner Lectures delivered at Trinity College.
• 1922. The Principle of Relativity with Applications to Physical Science. Cambridge Uni. Press.
• 1925 (1910–13), with Bertrand Russell. Principia Mathematica, in 3 vols. Cambridge Uni. Press. Vol. 1 to *56 is available as a CUP paperback.
• 1925a. Science and the Modern World. 1997 paperback, Free Press (Simon & Schuster), ISBN 0-684-83639-4. Vol. 55 of the Great Books of the Western World series.
• 1925b (1919). An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge. Cambridge Uni. Press.
• 1926. Religion in the Making. 1974, New American Library. 1996, with introduction by Judith A. Jones, Fordham Univ. Press.
• 1927. Symbolism, Its Meaning and Effect. The 1927 Barbour-Page Lectures, given at the University of Virginia. 1985 paperback, Fordham University Press.
• 1929. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. 1979 corrected edition, edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne, Free Press. (Part V. Final Interpretation)
• 1929a. The Aims of Education and Other Essays. 1985 paperback, Free Press, ISBN 0-02-935180-4.
• 1929b. Function of Reason. 1971 paperback, Beacon Press, ISBN 0-8070-1573-3.
• 1933. Adventures of Ideas. 1967 paperback, Free Press, ISBN 0-02-935170-7.
• 1934. Nature and Life. University of Chicago Press.
• 1938. Modes of Thought. 1968 paperback, Free Press, ISBN 0-02-935210-X.
• 1947. Essays in Science and Philosophy. Runes, Dagobert, ed. Philosophical Library.
• 1947. The Wit and Wisdom of Whitehead. Beacon Press.
• 1951. "Mathematics and the Good" in Schilpp, P. A., ed., 1951. The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, 2nd. ed. New York, Tudor Publishing Company: 666-81. Also printed in:
  • in The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, 1941, P. A. Schilpp, Ed.;
  • in Science & Philosophy; Philosophical Library, 1948.
• 1953. A. N. Whitehead: An Anthology. Northrop, F.S.C., and Gross, M.W., eds. Cambridge Univ. Press.
• Price, Lucien, 1954. Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead, with Introduction by Sir Ross David. Reprinted 1977, Greenwood Press Reprint, ISBN 0-8371-9341-9, and 2001 with Foreword by Caldwell Titcomb, David R. Godine Publisher, ISBN 1-56792-129-9.

=

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Browning, Douglas and Myers, William T., eds., 1998. Philosophers of Process. Fordham Univ. Press. ISBN 0-8232-1879-1, contains some primary texts including:
  • "Critique of Scientific Materialism"
  • "Process"
  • "Fact and Form"
  • "Objects and Subjects"
  • "The Grouping of Occasions"
• Chul Chun: Kreativität und Relativität der Welt beim frühen Whitehead: Alfred North Whiteheads frühe Naturphilosophie (1915–1922) - eine Rekonstruktion, mit einem Vorwort von Michael Welker, Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag 2010, ISBN 978-3-7887-2352-1
• Contemporary Whitehead Studies (book series). Rodopi.
• Durand G., 2007. "Des événements aux objets. La méthode de l'abstraction extensive chez A. N. Whitehead". Ontos Verlag.
• During, Elie. 2007. "Philosophical twins ? Bergson and Whitehead on Langevin's Paradox and the Meaning of 'Space-Time'" in Durand, G. & Weber, M., eds., Alfred North Whitehead's Principles of Natural Knowledge. Frankfurt & Lancaster: Ontos Verlag.
• During, Elie. 2008. "Durations and Simultaneities : Temporal Perspectives and Relativistic Time in Whitehead and Bergson" in M. Weber (ed.), Handbook of Whiteheadian Process Thought. Frankfurt & Lancaster: Ontos Verlag.
• Grattan-Guinness, Ivor, 2000. The Search for Mathematical Roots 1870-1940. Princeton Uni. Press.
• ------, 2002, "Algebras, Projective Geometry, Mathematical Logic, and Constructing the World: Intersections in the Philosophy of Mathematics of A. N. Whitehead," Historia Mathematica 29: 427-62. Many references.
• Griffin, David Ray, 2007. "Whitehead's Radically Different Postmodern Philosophy. An Argument for Its Contemporary Relevance", New York: State University of New York Press.
• Hartshorne, Charles (1972). Whitehead's Philosophy: Selected Essays, 1935-1970. University of Nebraska Press
• Henning, Brian G. The Ethics of Creativity: Beauty, Morality, and Nature in a Processive Cosmos. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005.
• Holtz, Harald and Ernest Wolf-Gazo, eds. Whitehead und der Prozeßbegriff / Whitehead and The Idea of Process. Proceedings of The First International Whitehead-Symposion. Verlag Karl Alber, Freiburg i. B. / München 1984. ISBN 3-495-47517-6
• Johnson, A. H. (Allison Heartz), Ed., (2007) The Wit and Wisdom of Alfred North Whitehead. Kessinger Publishing.
• Kneebone, G., 2001, (1963). Mathematical Logic and the Foundations of Mathematics. Dover reprint: ISBN 0-486-41712-3. The final chapter is a lucid introduction to some of the ideas in Whitehead (1919, 1925b, 1929).
• LeClerc, Ivor, ed., 1961. The Relevance of Whitehead. Allen & Unwin.
• Lowe, Victor, 1962. Understanding Whitehead. Johns Hopkins Uni. Press.
• ------, 1985. A. N. Whitehead: The Man and His Work, Vol. 1. Johns Hopkins U. Press.
• ------, and Schneewind, J. B., 1990. A. N. Whitehead: The Man and His Work, Vol. 2. Johns Hopkins U. Press.
• Martin, Richard Milton, 1974. Whitehead's Categorial Scheme and Other Essays. Martinus Nijhoff.
• Mays, Wolfgang, 1959. The Philosophy of Whitehead. Allen & Unwin.
• ------, 1977. Whitehead's Philosophy of Science and Metaphysics: An Introduction to his Thought. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
• Mesle, C. Robert, 2008. Process-Relational Philosophy: An Introduction to Alfred North Whitehead, Templeton foundation Press. ISBN 978-1-59947-132-7
• Nobo, Jorge L., 1986. Whitehead's Metaphysics of Extension and Solidarity. SUNY Press.
• Pedraja, Luis G., 2011. "Alfred North Whitehead," in Beyond the Pale: Reading Theology from the Margins, Edited by Miguel A. De La Torre and Stacey M. Floyd Thomas. Westminster John-Knox Press. ISBN 978-0664236793
• Willard Quine, 1941, "Whitehead and the rise of modern logic" in Schilpp (1941). Reprinted in his 1995 Selected Logic Papers. Harvard Univ. Press.
• Rapp, Friedrich and Reiner Wiehl, eds. Whiteheads Metaphysik der Kreativität. Internationales Whitehead-Symposium Bad Homburg 1983. . Verlag Karl Alber, Freiburg i. B. / München 1986. ISBN 3-495-47612-1
• Rescher, Nicholas, 1995. Process Metaphysics. SUNY Press.
• ------, 2001. Process Philosophy: A Survey of Basic Issues. Univ. of Pittsburg Press.
• Siebers, Johan, 2002. The method of speculative philosophy: an essay on the foundations of Whitehead's metaphysicis. Kassel: Kassel University Press GmbH. ISBN 3-933146-79-8
• Schilpp, Paul A., ed., 1941. The Philosophy of A. N. Whitehead (The Library of Living Philosophers). New York: Tudor.
• Smith, Olav Bryant, 2004. Myths of the Self: Narrative Identity and Postmodern Metaphysics, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, [ISBN 0-7391-0843-3], contains a section called 'Alfred North Whitehead: Toward a More Fundamental Ontology' that is an overview of Whitehead's metaphysics.
• Stengers, Isabelle, 2011. Thinking With Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts. translated by Michael Chase, Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
• Weber, Michel, 2006. Whitehead's Pancreativism—The Basics. Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag.
• Will, Clifford, 1993. Theory and Experiment in Gravitational Physics. Cambridge University Press.

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Alfred North Whitehead

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Alfred North Whitehead

• Whitehead Research Project, dedicated to the research of, and scholarship on, the texts, philosophy and life of Alfred North Whitehead; explores and analyzes the relevance of Whitehead's thought in dialogue with contemporary philosophies
• Center for Process Studies at the Claremont School of Theology. Primarily concerned with the thought of Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne, and the various modes of thought that have emerged out of their work; the documentation includes their Resource Guide for Physics and Whitehead
• Society for the Study of Process Philosophies
• Critical Edition of Whitehead
• Whitehead, Alfred N., A Treatise on Universal Algebra with Applications, Cambridge University Press, 1898 (full text).
• Irvine, A. D. "Alfred North Whitehead", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Alfred North Whitehead", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews, http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Whitehead.html .
• A N Whitehead: New World Philosopher
• Centre de philosophie pratique « Chromatiques whiteheadiennes »
• Works by Alfred North Whitehead at Project Gutenberg
• Synge, John L. "Whitehead's Principle of Relativity" on arXiv.org

Bjarke Ingels
Bjarke Ingels in 2008
Born	(1974-10-02) 2 October 1974 (age 37) Copenhagen, Denmark
Nationality	Danish
Alma mater	Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture
Work
Practice	Bjarke Ingels Group
Buildings	Mountain Dwellings

Bjarke Ingels (born 2 October 1974) is a Danish architect. He heads the architectural practice Bjarke Ingels Group which he founded in 2006. In 2009 he co-founded the design consultancy KiBiSi. In his designs, Bjarke Ingels often tries to achieve a balance between playful and practical approaches to architecture.

Early career[link]

Bjarke Ingels studied architecture at the Royal Academy in Copenhagen and the Technica Superior de Arquitectura in Barcelona, receiving his diploma in 1999. As a third year student he set up his first practice and won his first competition.^[1] From 1998-2001 he worked for Office of Metropolitan Architecture and Rem Koolhaas in Rotterdam.

VM housing in Ørestad, Denmark

In 2001, Bjarke Ingels returned to Copenhagen to set up the architectural practice PLOT together with Belgian OMA colleague Julien de Smedt. The company rapidly achieved success, receiving significant national and international attention for their inventive designs. They were awarded a Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2004 for a proposal for a new music house for Stavanger, Norway. Their first major achievement was the award-winning VM Houses in Ørestad, Copenhagen, in 2005. Despite its success, PLOT was disbanded in January 2006 and Bjarke Ingels created Bjarke Ingels Group, BIG, while his former partner founded JDS / Julien De Smedt Architects.^[2]

Bjarke Ingels Group[link]

With BIG, Bjarke Ingels has continued the ideology from PLOT and has several major projects under construction or development both in Denmark and abroad. These include 8 House in Ørestad and the new Danish national Maritime museum in Elsinore, hotel projects in Norway, a highrise designed in the shape of the Chinese character for 'people' for Shanghai, a masterplan for the redevelopment of a former naval base and oil industry wasteland into a zero-emission resort and entertainment city off the coast of Baku, Azerbaijan,^[3] shaped as the seven mountains of the country, and a museum overlooking Mexico City.

Under the BIG Banner Bjarke recently published "Yes is more - an archcomic on architectural evolution".

On 24 July 2009, he spoke at the prestigious TED event in Oxford, UK.^[4]

He presented the case study “Hedonistic sustainability” in the workshop Manage complexity - With integral solutions to an economy of means at the 3rd International Holcim Forum 2010 in Mexico City and shall be a member of the Holcim Awards regional jury for Europe in 2011.^[5]

Design philosophy[link]

Explaining his design ideas, Bjarke Ingels states:

Academia[link]

Alongside his architectural practice, Bjarke has been active as a Visiting Professor at the Rice University School of Architecture, the Harvard Graduate School of Design,^[7] the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture,^[8] and the Yale School of Architecture.

Selected projects[link]

VM Houses

Mountain Dwellings

8 House

• Islands Brygge Harbour Bath, 2,500 m2 (completed 2003)
• Maritime Youth House, Amager, Denmark (completed 2004)
• VM Houses, Ørestad, Denmark (completed 2005)
• Helsingør Psychiatric Hospital, Elsinore, Denmark (completed 2005)
• Sjakket, Copenhagen (completed 2007)
• People's Building, Shanghai, China
• Mountain Dwellings, Ørestad, Copenhagen (completed 2008)
• National Maritime Museum, Elsinore, Denmark (u/c, completion 2011/12)
• 8 House, Ørestad, Copenhagen (2010)^[9]
• Danish pavilion, EXPO 2010, Shanghai, China
• Superkilen, Copenhagen, DK (competition win 2008, completion 2011)
• Zira Island masterplan, Baku, Azerbaijan
• The Battery, Copenhagen
• New Tamayo Museum, Mexico City (competition win, April 2009)
• Kaufhauskanal, Hamburg, Germany (competition win, April 2009)^[10]
• New Tallinn City Hall, Tallinn, Estonia (competition win, June 2009)^[11]
• Astana National Library, Astana, Kazakhstan (competition win, August 2009)^[12]
• Shenzhen International Energy Mansion, Shenzhen, China (competition win, September 2009)^[13]
• World Village of Women Sports, Malmö, Sweden (competition win, November 2009).^[14]
• Faroe Islands Education Centre, Thorshavn, Faroe Islands (competition win, December 2009)^[15]
• Amagerforbrænding, Copenhagen, Denmark (competition win 2011)^[16]

Awards[link]

• 2001 and 2003 Henning Larsen Prize
• 2002 Nykredits Architecture Prize
• 2003 Scanorama Design Award
• 2004 ar+d award for the Maritime Youth House
• 2004 Golden Lion, Venice Biennale (for Stavanger Concert Hall)
• 2006 Forum AID Award, Best Building in Scandinavia in 2006 (for VM Houses)
• 2007 Mies van der Rohe Award Traveling Exhibition – VM Houses
• 2007 Contract World Award for Best Interior (for Sjakket Headquarters)
• 2008 Forum AID Award for Best Building in Scandinavia in 2008 (for Mountain Dwellings)
• 2008 World Architecture Festival Award for Best Residential Building (for Mountain Dwellings)
• 2009 ULI Award for Excellence (for Mountain Dwellings)^[17]
• 2009 MIPIM Award for best residential development (for Mountain Dwellings)^[18]
• 2010 European Prize for Architecture^[19]
• 2011 Danish Crown Prince Couple's Culture Prize

Exhibitions[link]

• 2007 BIG City, Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York^[20]
• 2009 Yes is More, Danish Architecture Centre, Copenhagen^[21][22]
• 2010 Yes is More, CAPC Bordeaux
• 2010 Yes is More, WECHSELRAUM, Stuttgart

Bibliography[link]

• Bjarke Ingels, 'Yes is More: An Archicomic on Architectural Evolution’, Copenhagen 2009, ISBN – 9788799298808^[23]

See also[link]

• Architecture of Denmark

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Bjarke Ingels Group

• Official web site
• Bjarke Ingels design consultancy KiBiSi.com
• TED Talk, Bjarke Ingels at TED
• Television interview
• BIG Projects
• webcast at DAC (in Danish)
• Bjarke interviewed for Studio Banana
• 'Yes is More' Talk at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), London 2010(video)
• Interview with Bjarke Ingels Archi-Ninja.com

Nana April Jun is one of the personae of Christofer Lämgren (b 1974), a Swedish artist who works with text, audio, image and installation.

The Ontology of Noise[link]

Nana April Jun's debut album The Ontology of Noise^[1] was released in February 2009 on the UK-based audio-visual label, Touch. The Ontology of Noise is a work of conceptual sound art, consisting of five minimalist compositions. The album, which researches the hallucinogenic qualities of noise has been described as grey^[2] but has also been said to have more in common with natural landscapes than processed noises.^[3]

The Ontology of Noise is mastered by Denis Blackham.

Discography[link]

• Eleh / Nana April Jun - Observations & Momentum - (split 12´vinyl) 2009 (Touch)
• The Ontology of Noise - (CD) 2009 (Touch)

References[link]

1. ^ http://www.touchmusic.org.uk/catalogue/tone_37_nana_april_jun_the_ont.html
2. ^ http://www.factmagazine.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2223&Itemid=105
3. ^ http://www.popmatters.com/pm/review/94081-nana-april-junontology-of-noise/

External links[link]

• Nana April Jun discography at Discogs.com
• Nana April Jun official website
• Touch

Alain Badiou

Alain Badiou. Fnac Montparnasse (Paris). February 5th, 2010
Born	(1937-01-17) 17 January 1937 (age 75) Rabat, French Morocco
Era	Contemporary philosophy
Region	French philosophy
School	Marxism Continental philosophy
Main interests	Set Theory, Mathematics, Metapolitics, Ontology, Marxism
Notable ideas	Événement (Event), ontologie du multiple (ontology of the multiple & ontology is mathematics), Un n'est pas ("The One is Not")
Influenced by Plato, Marx, Cantor, Albert Lautman, Mao Zedong, Lacan, Althusser, Paul Cohen, Sartre, Deleuze, Lyotard, Hegel, Mallarmé, Beckett, Fernando Pessoa, Sylvain Lazarus
Influenced Slavoj Žižek, Peter Hallward, Simon Critchley, Ray Brassier, Sylvain Lazarus, Jason Barker, Quentin Meillassoux, Bruno Bosteels, Alberto Toscano, Oliver Feltham, Justin Clemens, Nina Power

Alain Badiou (French pronunciation: [alɛ̃ badju]  (listen) (help·info); born 17 January 1937 in Rabat, Morocco) is a French philosopher, professor at European Graduate School, formerly chair of Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS).^[1]

Badiou has written about the concepts of being, truth and the subject in a way that, he claims, is neither postmodern nor simply a repetition of modernity. Politically, Badiou is committed to the far left, and to the communist tradition.

Slavoj Žižek has written of Badiou that he is "a figure like Plato or Hegel walk[ing] here among us".^[2]

Biography[link]

Badiou was a student at the Lycée Louis-Le-Grand and then the Ecole Normale Supérieure (1957–1961). He taught at the lycée in Reims from 1963 where he became a close friend of fellow playwright (and philosopher) François Regnault,^[3] and published a couple of novels before moving to the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes-Saint Denis) in 1969.^[4] Badiou was politically active very early on, and was one of the founding members of the Unified Socialist Party (PSU). The PSU was particularly active in the struggle for the decolonization of Algeria. He wrote his first novel, Almagestes, in 1964. In 1967 he joined a study group organized by Louis Althusser, became increasingly influenced by Jacques Lacan and became a member of the editorial board of Cahiers pour l’Analyse.^[4] By then he "already had a solid grounding in mathematics and logic (along with Lacanian theory)",^[4] and his own two contributions to the pages of Cahiers "anticipate many of the distinctive concerns of his later philosophy".^[4]

The student uprisings of May 1968 reinforced Badiou's commitment to the far Left, and he participated in increasingly militant groups, such as the Union des communistes de France marxiste-léniniste (UCFml). To quote Badiou himself, the UCFml is "the Maoist organization established in late 1969 by Natacha Michel, Sylvain Lazarus, myself and a fair number of young people".^[5] During this time, Badiou joined the faculty of the newly founded University of Paris VIII/Vincennes-Saint Denis which was a bastion of counter-cultural thought. There he engaged in fierce intellectual debates with fellow professors Gilles Deleuze and Jean-François Lyotard, whose philosophical works he considered unhealthy deviations from the Althusserian program of a scientific Marxism.

In the 1980s, as both Althusserian Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis went into decline (with Lacan dead and Althusser in an asylum), Badiou published more technical and abstract philosophical works, such as Théorie du sujet (1982), and his magnum opus, Being and Event (1988). Nonetheless, Badiou has never renounced Althusser or Lacan, and sympathetic references to Marxism and psychoanalysis are not uncommon in his more recent works (most notably Petit panthéon portatif/Pocket Pantheon).^[6][7]

He took up his current position at the ENS in 1999. He is also associated with a number of other institutions, such as the Collège International de Philosophie. He was a member of "L'Organisation Politique" which, as mentioned above, he founded in 1985 with some comrades from the Maoist UCFml. This organization disbanded in 2007, according to the French Wikipedia article (linked to in the previous sentence). Badiou has also enjoyed success as a dramatist with plays such as Ahmed le Subtil.

In the last decade, an increasing number of Badiou's works have been translated into English, such as Ethics, Deleuze, Manifesto for Philosophy, Metapolitics, and Being and Event. Short pieces by Badiou have likewise appeared in American and English periodicals, such as Lacanian Ink, New Left Review, Radical Philosophy, Cosmos and History [1] and Parrhesia. Unusually for a contemporary European philosopher his work is increasingly being taken up by militants in movements of the poor in countries like India, the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Africa where he is often read together with Frantz Fanon.^{[citation needed]}

Lately Badiou got into a fierce controversy within the confines of Parisian intellectual life. It started in 2005 with the publication of his "Circonstances 3: Portées du mot 'juif'" – The Uses of the Word "Jew".^[8] This book generated a strong response with calls of Badiou being labelled Anti-Semitic. The wrangling became a cause célèbre with articles going back and forth in the French newspaper Le Monde and in the cultural journal "Les temps modernes." Another philosopher, Jean-Claude Milner, has accused Badiou of Anti-Semitism.^[9]

Key concepts[link]

Badiou makes repeated use of several concepts throughout his philosophy. One of the aims of his thought is to show that his categories of truth are useful for any type of philosophical critique. Therefore, he uses them to interrogate art and history as well as ontology and scientific discovery. Johannes Thumfart argues that Badiou's philosophy can be regarded as a contemporary reinterpretation of Platonism.^[10]

Conditions[link]

According to Badiou, philosophy is suspended from four conditions (art, love, politics, and science), each of them fully independent "truth procedures." (For Badiou's notion of truth procedures, see below.) Badiou consistently maintains throughout his work (but most systematically in Manifesto for Philosophy) that philosophy must avoid the temptation to suture itself (that is, to hand over its entire intellectual effort) to any of these independent truth procedures. When philosophy does suture itself to one of its conditions (and Badiou argues that the history of philosophy during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is primarily a history of sutures), what results is a philosophical "disaster." Consequently, philosophy is, according to Badiou, a thinking of the compossibility of the several truth procedures, whether this is undertaken through the investigation of the intersections between distinct truth procedures (the intersection of art and love in the novel, for instance), or whether this is undertaken through the more traditionally philosophical work of addressing categories like truth or the subject (concepts that are, as concepts, external to the individual truth procedures, though they are functionally operative in the truth procedures themselves). For Badiou, when philosophy addresses the four truth procedures in a genuinely philosophical manner, rather than through a suturing abandonment of philosophy as such, it speaks of them with a theoretical terminology that marks its philosophical character: inaesthetics rather than art; metapolitics rather than politics; ontology rather than science; etc.

Truth, for Badiou, is a specifically philosophical category. While philosophy's several conditions are, on their own terms, "truth procedures" (i.e., they produce truths as they are pursued), it is only philosophy that can speak of the several truth procedures as truth procedures. (The lover, for instance, does not think of her love as a question of truth, but simply and rightly as a question of love. Only the philosopher sees in the true lover's love the unfolding of a truth.) Badiou has a very rigorous notion of truth, one that is strongly against the grain of much of contemporary European thought. Badiou at once embraces the traditional modernist notion that truths are genuinely invariant (always and everywhere the case, eternal and unchanging) and the incisively postmodernist notion that truths are constructed through processes. Badiou's theory of truth, exposited throughout his work, accomplishes this strange mixture by uncoupling invariance and self-evidence (such that invariance does not imply self-evidence), as well as by uncoupling constructedness from relativity (such that constructedness does not lead to relativism).

The idea, here, is that a truth's invariance makes it genuinely indiscernible: because a truth is everywhere and always the case, it passes unnoticed unless there is a rupture in the laws of being and appearance, during which the truth in question becomes, but only for a passing moment, discernible. Such a rupture is what Badiou calls an event, according to a theory originally worked out in Being and Event and fleshed out in important ways in Logics of Worlds. The individual who chances to witness such an event, if he is faithful to what he has glimpsed, can then introduce the truth by naming it into worldly situations. For Badiou, it is by positioning oneself to the truth of an event that a human animal becomes a subject; subjectivity is not an inherent human trait. According to a process or procedure that subsequently unfolds only if those who subject themselves to the glimpsed truth continue faithful in the work of announcing the truth in question, genuine knowledge is produced (knowledge often appears in Badiou's work under the title of the "veridical"). While such knowledge is produced in the process of being faithful to a truth event, it should be noted that, for Badiou, knowledge, in the figure of the encyclopedia, always remains fragile, subject to what may yet be produced as faithful subjects of the event produce further knowledge. According to Badiou, truth procedures proceed to infinity, such that faith (fidelity) outstrips knowledge. (Badiou, following both Lacan and Heidegger, distances truth from knowledge.) The dominating ideology of the day, which Badiou terms "democratic materialism," denies the existence of truth and only recognize "bodies" and "languages." Badiou proposes a turn towards "dialectical materialism," which recognizes that there are only bodies and languages, except there are also truths.

Inaesthetic[link]

In Handbook of Inaesthetics Badiou coins the phrase "inaesthetic" to refer to a concept of artistic creation that denies "the reflection/object relation". Reacting against the idea of mimesis, or poetic reflection of "nature", Badiou claims that art is "immanent" and "singular". It is immanent in the sense that its truth is given in its immediacy in a given work of art, and singular in that its truth is found in art and art alone. His view of the link between philosophy and art is tied into the motif of pedagogy, which he claims functions so as to "arrange the forms of knowledge in a way that some truth may come to pierce a hole in them". He develops these ideas with examples from the prose of Samuel Beckett and the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé and Fernando Pessoa (who he argues has developed a body of work that philosophy is currently incapable of incorporating), among others.

[edit] Introduction to Being and Event

The major propositions of Badiou's philosophy all find their basis in Being and Event, in which he continues his attempt (which he began in Théorie du sujet) to reconcile a notion of the subject with ontology, and in particular post-structuralist and constructivist ontologies.^[11] A frequent criticism of post-structuralist work is that it prohibits, through its fixation on semiotics and language, any notion of a subject. Badiou's work is, by his own admission,^[12] an attempt to break out of contemporary philosophy's fixation upon language, which he sees almost as a straitjacket. This effort leads him, in Being and Event, to combine rigorous mathematical formulae with his readings of poets such as Mallarmé and Hölderlin and religious thinkers such as Pascal. His philosophy draws upon both 'analytical' and 'continental' traditions. In Badiou's own opinion, this combination places him awkwardly relative to his contemporaries, meaning that his work had been only slowly taken up.^[13] Being and Event offers an example of this slow uptake, in fact: it was translated into English only in 2005, a full seventeen years after its French publication.

As is implied in the title of the book, two elements mark the thesis of Being and Event: the place of ontology, or 'the science of being qua being' (being in itself), and the place of the event – which is seen as a rupture in being – through which the subject finds realization and reconciliation with truth. This situation of being and the rupture which characterizes the event are thought in terms of set theory, and specifically Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory (with the axiom of choice), to which Badiou accords a fundamental role in a manner quite distinct from the majority of either mathematicians or philosophers.

Mathematics as ontology[link]

	Set theory portal
	Mathematics portal

For Badiou the problem which the Greek tradition of philosophy has faced and never satisfactorily dealt with is that while beings themselves are plural, and thought in terms of multiplicity, being itself is thought to be singular; that is, it is thought in terms of the one. He proposes as the solution to this impasse the following declaration: that the one is not. This is why Badiou accords set theory (the axioms of which he refers to as the Ideas of the multiple) such stature, and refers to mathematics as the very place of ontology: Only set theory allows one to conceive a 'pure doctrine of the multiple'. Set theory does not operate in terms of definite individual elements in groupings but only functions insofar as what belongs to a set is of the same relation as that set (that is, another set too). What separates sets out therefore is not an existential positive proposition, but other multiples whose properties validate its presentation; which is to say their structural relation. The structure of being thus secures the regime of the count-as-one. So if one is to think of a set – for instance, the set of people, or humanity – as counting as one the elements which belong to that set, it can then secure the multiple (the multiplicities of humans) as one consistent concept (humanity), but only in terms of what does not belong to that set. What is, in following, crucial for Badiou is that the structural form of the count-as-one, which makes multiplicities thinkable, implies that the proper name of being does not belong to an element as such (an original 'one'), but rather the void set (written Ø), the set to which nothing (not even the void set itself) belongs. It may help to understand the concept 'count-as-one' if it is associated with the concept of 'terming': a multiple is not one, but it is referred to with 'multiple': one word. To count a set as one is to mention that set. How the being of terms such as 'multiple' does not contradict the non-being of the one can be understood by considering the multiple nature of terminology: for there to be a term without there also being a system of terminology, within which the difference between terms gives context and meaning to any one term, does not coincide with what is understood by 'terminology', which is precisely difference (thus multiplicity) conditioning meaning. Since the idea of conceiving of a term without meaning does not compute, the count-as-one is a structural effect or a situational operation and not an event of truth. Multiples which are 'composed' or 'consistent' are count-effects; inconsistent multiplicity is the presentation of presentation.

Badiou's use of set theory in this manner is not just illustrative or heuristic. Badiou uses the axioms of Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory to identify the relationship of being to history, Nature, the State, and God. Most significantly this use means that (as with set theory) there is a strict prohibition on self-belonging; a set cannot contain or belong to itself. Russell's paradox famously ruled that possibility out of formal logic. (This paradox can be thought through in terms of a 'list of lists that do not contain themselves': if such a list does not write itself on the list the property is incomplete, as there will be one missing; if it does, it is no longer a list that does not contain itself.) So too does the axiom of foundation – or to give an alternative name the axiom of regularity – enact such a prohibition (cf. p. 190 in Being and Event). (This axiom states that all sets contain an element for which only the void [empty] set names what is common to both the set and its element.) Badiou's philosophy draws two major implications from this prohibition. Firstly, it secures the inexistence of the 'one': there cannot be a grand overarching set, and thus it is fallacious to conceive of a grand cosmos, a whole Nature, or a Being of God. Badiou is therefore – against Cantor, from whom he draws heavily – staunchly atheist. However, secondly, this prohibition prompts him to introduce the event. Because, according to Badiou, the axiom of foundation 'founds' all sets in the void, it ties all being to the historico-social situation of the multiplicities of de-centred sets – thereby effacing the positivity of subjective action, or an entirely 'new' occurrence. And whilst this is acceptable ontologically, it is unacceptable, Badiou holds, philosophically. Set theory mathematics has consequently 'pragmatically abandoned' an area which philosophy cannot. And so, Badiou argues, there is therefore only one possibility remaining: that ontology can say nothing about the event.

The event and the subject[link]

The principle of the event is where Badiou diverges from the majority of late twentieth century philosophy and social thought, and in particular the likes of Foucault, Butler, Lacan and Deleuze, among others. In short, it represents that which is outside of ontology. Badiou's problem here is, unsurprisingly, the question of how to 'make use' of that which cannot be discerned. But it is a problem he views as vital, because if one constructs the world only from that which can be discerned and therefore given a name, it results in either the destitution of subjectivity and the removal of the subject from ontology (the criticism continually leveled at Foucault's discursive universe), or the Panglossian solution of Leibniz: that God is language in its supposed completion.

Badiou again turns here to mathematics and set theory – Badiou's language of ontology – to study the possibility of an indiscernible element existing extrinsically to the situation of ontology. He employs the strategy of the mathematician Paul J. Cohen, using what are called the conditions of sets. These conditions are thought of in terms of domination, a domination being that which defines a set. (If one takes, in binary language, the set with the condition 'items marked only with ones', any item marked with zero negates the property of the set. The condition which has only ones is thus dominated by any condition which has zeros in it [cf. p. 367-71 in Being and Event].) Badiou reasons using these conditions that every discernible (nameable or constructible) set is dominated by the conditions which don't possess the property that makes it discernible as a set. (The property 'one' is always dominated by 'not one'.) These sets are, in line with constructible ontology, relative to one's being-in-the-world and one's being in language (where sets and concepts, such as the concept 'humanity', get their names). However, he continues, the dominations themselves are, whilst being relative concepts, not necessarily intrinsic to language and constructible thought; rather one can axiomatically define a domination – in the terms of mathematical ontology – as a set of conditions such that any condition outside the domination is dominated by at least one term inside the domination. One does not necessarily need to refer to constructible language to conceive of a 'set of dominations', which he refers to as the indiscernible set, or the generic set. It is therefore, he continues, possible to think beyond the strictures of the relativistic constructible universe of language, by a process Cohen calls forcing. And he concludes in following that while ontology can mark out a space for an inhabitant of the constructible situation to decide upon the indiscernible, it falls to the subject – about which the ontological situation cannot comment – to nominate this indiscernible, this generic point; and thus nominate, and give name to, the undecidable event. Badiou thereby marks out a philosophy by which to refute the apparent relativism or apoliticism in post-structuralist thought.

Badiou's ultimate ethical maxim is therefore one of: 'decide upon the undecidable'. It is to name the indiscernible, the generic set, and thus name the event that re-casts ontology in a new light. He identifies four domains in which a subject (who, it is important to note, becomes a subject through this process) can potentially witness an event: love, science, politics and art. By enacting fidelity to the event within these four domains one performs a 'generic procedure', which in its undecidability is necessarily experimental, and one potentially recasts the situation in which being takes place. Through this maintenance of fidelity, truth has the potentiality to emerge.

In line with his concept of the event, Badiou maintains, politics is not about politicians, but activism based on the present situation and the evental [sic] (his translators' neologism) rupture. So too does love have this characteristic of becoming anew. Even in science the guesswork that marks the event is prominent. He vigorously rejects the tag of 'decisionist' (the idea that once something is decided it 'becomes true'), but rather argues that the recasting of a truth comes prior to its veracity or verifiability. As he says of Galileo (p. 401):

When Galileo announced the principle of inertia, he was still separated from the truth of the new physics by all the chance encounters that are named in subjects such as Descartes or Newton. How could he, with the names he fabricated and displaced (because they were at hand – ‘movement’, ‘equal proportion’, etc.), have supposed the veracity of his principle for the situation to-come that was the establishment of modern science; that is, the supplementation of his situation with the indiscernible and unfinishable part that one has to name ‘rational physics’?

Badiou, whilst keen to stress the non-equivalence between politics and philosophy, thus finds his political approach – one of activism, militancy, and scepticism of parliamentary-democratic process – backed up by his philosophy based around singular, situated truths, and potential revolutions.

L'Organisation Politique[link]

Alain Badiou is a founding member (along with Natacha Michel and Sylvain Lazarus) of the militant French political organisation L'Organisation Politique, which was active from 1985 until it disbanded in 2007.^[14] It called itself a post-party organization concerned with direct popular intervention in a wide range of issues (including immigration, labor, and housing). In addition to numerous writings and interventions, L'Organisation Politique stressed the importance of developing political prescriptions concerning undocumented migrants (les sans papiers), stressing that they must be conceived primarily as workers and not immigrants.^[15]

Works[link]

English translations[link]

Journals[link]

• The International Journal of Badiou Studies
• "The Cultural Revolution: The Last Revolution?", transl. by Bruno Bosteels; positions: asia critique, Volume 13, Issue 3, Winter 2005; (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005): ISSN 1067-9847
• "Selections from Théorie du sujet on the Cultural Revolution", transl. by Alberto Toscano with the assistance of Lorenzo Chiesa and Nina Power; positions: asia critique, Volume 13, Issue 3, Winter 2005; (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005): ISSN 1067-9847
• "Further Selections from Théorie du sujet on the Cultural Revolution", transl. by Lorenzo Chiesa; positions: asia critique, Volume 13, Issue 3, Winter 2005; (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005): ISSN 1067-9847
• “The Triumphant Restoration", transl. by Alberto Toscano; positions: asia critique, Volume 13, Issue 3, Winter 2005; (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005): ISSN 1067-9847
• "An Essential Philosophical Thesis: 'It Is Right to Rebel against the Reactionaries'", transl. by Alberto Toscano; positions: asia critique, Volume 13, Issue 3, Winter 2005; (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005): ISSN 1067-9847

DVD[link]

Lectures[link]

Further reading[link]

Notes[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Alain Badiou

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Alain Badiou

• Alain Badiou Faculty Page at European Graduate School
• Alain Badiou Bibliography at Lacan Dot Com
• What is a philosophical Institution? or: Address, Transmission, Inscription. Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, Vol 2, No 1-2 (2006)

Critical Opinions[link]

• Alain Badiou's "Politics of Emancipation": A Communism Locked Within the Confines of the Bourgeois World by Raymond Lotta, Nayi Duniya, and K. J. A.
• On Alain Badiou and Logiques des mondes by Slavoj Zizek
• The Marxist hypothesis: a response to Alain Badiou's "communist hypothesis" by Chris Cutrone