Toula Nicolacopoulos: The Radical Critique of Liberalism: In Memory of a Vision (2008)

Despite political theorists’ repeated attempts to demonstrate their incoherence liberal values appear to have withstood the test of time. Indeed, engagement with them has become the meeting point of the different political philosophical traditions. But should radical critique justifiably become a thing of the past? Should political philosophy now be conducted in the light of the triumph of liberalism? These are the wider questions that the book takes up in an attempt to demonstrate the intellectual power of systemic critique in the tradition of Hegel. The author argues that the most ambitious of the communitarian critiques of liberal thought failed due to a fundamental weakness of their philosophical methodology. Moreover, the re-workings of these critiques by feminists, discourse ethicists, postmodern and postcolonial theorists have been equally unsuccessful because they have not traced the individualist commitment of liberal theory back to its source in liberal inquiring practices. Working through the theories of prominent liberal theorists, including John Rawls, Jeremy Waldron, Charles Larmore and Will Kymlicka, the book demonstrates that an adequate appreciation of the deep structural flaws of liberal theory presupposes the application of a critical philosophical methodology that has the power to reveal the systemic interconnections within and between the varieties of liberal inquiring practices.

Publisher: Re.press
ISBN-13: 978-0-9803052-5-8 (paper)
978-0-9803052-8-9 (cloth)
ISBN-ebook: 978-0-9806665-6-4
Publication date: 1 July 2008
Pages: 292
Format: 234×156 mm (6×9 in) Paperback and Cloth
Series: Anamnesis

This book is Open Access. This work is not simply an electronic book; it is the open access version of a work that exists in a number of forms, the traditional printed form being one of them.

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Gilbert Simondon: On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (1958–) [FR, EN, ES]

“The purpose of this study is to attempt to stimulate awareness of the significance of technical objects. Culture has become a system of defense designed to safeguard man from technics. This is the result of the assumption that technical objects contain no human reality. We should like to show that culture fails to take into account that in technical reality there is a human reality, and that, if it is fully to play its role, culture must come to terms with technical entities as part of its body of knowledge and values. Recognition of the modes of existence of technical objects must be the result of philosophic consideration; what philosophy has to achieve in this respect is analogous to what the abolition of slavery achieved in affirming the worth of the individual human being.

The opposition established between the cultural and the technical and between man and machine is wrong and has no foundation. What underlies it is mere ignorance or resentment. It uses a mask of facile humanism to blind us to a reality that is full of human striving and rich in natural forces. This reality is the world of technical objects, the mediators between man and nature.” (from the Introduction)

French edition
Preface by John Hart
Afterword by Yves Deforge
Publisher Aubier, Paris, 1958, 1969, 1989
ISBN 2700718518

English edition, Part I
Translated by Ninian Mellamphy
With a preface by John Hart
Publisher University of Western Ontario, June 1980
98 pages

Commentary (EN)

Du mode d’existence des objets techniques (French, 1958/1969, added on 2014-4-21)
On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Part I (English, trans. Ninian Mellamphy, 1980, added on 2014-4-21). Different version (updated on 2012-8-23).
Du mode d’existence des objets techniques (French, 1958/1989, no OCR, updated on 2014-4-21)
El modo de existencia de los objetos técnicos (Spanish, trans. Margarita Martinez and Pablo Rodriguez, 2007, added on 2014-4-21)

Alain Badiou: The Concept of Model. An Introduction to the Materialist Epistemology of Mathematics (1969–)

“The Concept of Model is the first of Alain Badiou’s early books to be translated fully into English. With this publication English readers finally have access to a crucial work by one of the world’s greatest living philosophers. Written on the eve of the events of May 1968, The Concept of Model provides a solid mathematical basis for a rationalist materialism. Badiou’s concept of model distinguishes itself from both logical positivism and empiricism by introducing a new form of break into the hitherto implicated realms of science and ideology, and establishing a new way to understand their disjunctive relation. Readers coming to Badiou for the first time will be struck by the clarity and force of his presentation, and the key place that The Concept of Model enjoys in the overall development of Badiou’s thought will enable readers already familiar with his work to discern the lineaments of his later radical developments. This translation is accompanied by a stunning new interview with Badiou in which he elaborates on the connections between his early and most recent thought.”

First published as Le concept de modèle, Maspero, Paris, 1969.

Edited by Zachary L. Frazer and Tzuchien Tho
Publisher Re.press, December 2007
Transmission series
Open Access
ISBN 9780980305234
180 pages

Keywords and phrases
Alain Badiou, ontology, epistemological break, Althusserian, axiom of choice, formal system, Jacques-Alain Miller, model theory, mathematical logic, Michel Serres, ideology, deduction theorem, suture, Justin Clemens, free variable, semantic, logical positivism, mathematical production, Louis Althusser, Dialectical Materialism

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