Some Reflections about Alain Badiou’s Approach to Platonism in Mathematics

Abstract

A reproach has been done many times to post-modernism: its picking up mathematical notions or results, mostly by misrepresenting their real content, in order to strike the readers and obtaining their assent only by impressing them (i.e. through the authority of mathematics itself). In this paper I intend to point out that although Alain Badiou’s approach to philosophy starts with taking distance both from analytic philosophy and from French post-modernism, the categories that he uses for labelling logicism, formalism and intuitionism do not reflect the real content of the foundational schools. Hence, a re-thinking from him would be required about them, otherwise he would risk the same reproaches as post-modernists.