Being & Event Summary, Part 1

Ontology is traditionally the field of philosophy that deals with existence as such. Variously, it has attempted to describe what kinds of things exist, under what conditions these things exist, and what “to exist” means in the first place.

For some time now, philosophy has been mostly concerned with the third point, which could also be described as asking what being is. The question of being could even be described as philosophy’s central question, especially given that science has basically taken over the role of telling us what kinds of things exist. So while it is a question for physics whether or not multi-dimensional strings exist, a philosopher might insist that describing the underlying being of those strings belongs entirely to their field.

Alain Badiou presents a strange and disconcerting thesis, at least to a philosopher’s ears: ontology is not, and never has been, an element of philosophy. The question of what being is is entirely a matter for mathematics. For Badiou, ontology begins with the question of the one vs the many/multiple. The problem is, how can we think the multiple without making it just a sum of ones? In other words, how can a multiple be presented as subtracted from the one? An axiomatic, formal system can solve this problem in a way that normal language can not.