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Monday, December 25, 2017

Badiou and the supernumerary name

For Badiou's Being and Event, given this text is old, traditional in the wake of Logics of Worlds, it staggers from inconsistencies like the one I describe here.

His use of the term supernumerary throughout the book brings with it confusion as to the many inferred meanings, the Fregean senses, one can extract. It strikes me often when reading philosophy did the author use a word slyly, being duplicitous in meaning by design, or was he or she unaware of the translation that specific word can result in.

I suspect that philosophers, given the searing attacks anyone can make on any knowledge beneath transcendentals, play a dangerous game of courting many suspicious groups by picking and choosing cognitive synonyms at will.

When a mathematician specifies a word, at least the courtesy is given to the reader to make the meaning singular. Otherwise, and by convention, other mathematicians will attack the double entendre as a weakness applied to the entire argument. And therewith destroy it.

Philosophers are masters of self confusion. Herein is a habit that discredits an otherwise plausible argument. Here was von Wittgenstein's complaint and why they, his peers but not equals, tend to savage his honest work without merit. Wittgenstein doubted from knowledge, they impugned from emotions.

For Badiou's logic; he uses supernumerary for:

Supernumerary axioms
Supernumerary names
Supernumerary elements
Supernumerary being
Supernumerary multiple
Supernumerary symbol
Supernumerary situation
Supernumerary nomination

He uses it 53 times.

In his mind they might be all the same. In his comprehensive understanding he can elucidate the context to each. To the outside world, they cannot be equal. Or they have not been made exclusively the same.

Philosophy will never advance, no matter how dedicated, how intelligent, nor how driven it's mendicants are until and unless they decide to humble their horizons to smaller fundamental expositions that construct unassailable arguments.