Used book – Le Séminaire - L'Un: Descartes, Platon, Kant (1983-1984), Alain Badiou

"Between 1982, the publication date of Théorie du sujet, and 1988, the publication date of L’être et l’événement, my seminar was almost exclusively devoted to the study of texts from the great constitutive tradition of the history of philosophy. The purpose of this broad investigation was in fact to consolidate the construction of some fundamental concepts of my ontology, as it is discovered in L’être et l’événement.

In 1983-1984, relying on Descartes, Plato, and Kant, I meditated on the One, a concept which I intended to show should be stripped of its metaphysical preponderance, to be reduced to an operation I called "counting-for-one." This counting is empirical when it is only a mode of presence of the multiple. It is rational when it concerns a generic multiplicity, that is, the type of multiplicity which, having a universal value, deserves the name of truth. This investigation into the One was completed, during the year 1984-1985, by a meticulous work on the infinite, based on Aristotle, Spinoza, and Hegel. This seminar will be published next autumn. We will thus have a rather interesting history of classical philosophy." A.B. Since 1966, a significant part of the teaching of the philosopher Alain Badiou has taken the form of a seminar, a place for free speech and a laboratory of thought. Fayard publishers are publishing all of these Seminars from 1983 to the present day, a period for which documentation is abundant and continuous. This volume is the seventh in the series.