...insistent that philosophies which emphasize our situatedness, the fragility of our thinking, and our unsurpassable being-towards-death, cannot help but conjure up meaning in a nostalgic manner, since human finitude, so understood, necessarily stands in relation to a crypto-divine infinite. Feuerbach's thought, with its evocation of a natural world on which human beings are dependent, and which surrounds them too intimately ever to be objectified, offers an early example of the genre. But, of course, similar structures can be found in the pre-eminent philosophical oeuvre of the twentieth century, that of Heidegger. Indeed, the two paradigms against which Badiou measures himself are -- on the one hand -- Heidegger's thinking of finitude, and -- on the other -- the scientific naturalism of mainstream analytical philosophy, with its unavowed subjective correlate, an unbridled instrumental attitude to the world. Badiou agrees with Heidegger that the proper concern of philosophy is the ontological question. Yet his founding -- deeply anti-Heideggerian -- claim is that mathematics gives us our only access to being as such, indeed that mathematics is ontology. We live, irrevocably, in the world of the modern sciences, where nature is number: there will be no re-enchantment.

¶ 7:16 AM