The Multiplicity of Being: The Ontology of Alain Badiou

Tomáš Pivoda, The Multiplicity of Being: The Ontology of Alain Badiou PhD thesis Abstract The thesis introduces for the first time in the Czech philosophical context the ontology of the French philosopher Alain Badiou, as he set it out in his fundamental work Being and Event (L'être et l'événement, 1988). It first presents the starting point of Badiou's philosophy as well as the reasons of his identification of ontology with the set theory, and it points out Badiou's importance for contemporary philosophy, especially for the so called speculative realism around Quentin Meillassoux. The main axis of the exposition is then built around Badiou's four fundamental "Ideas": the multiplicity, the event, the truths and the subject, in connection with which it is shown how Badiou constructs his conceptual apparatus out of individual axioms of the set theory, whereby he follows the basic formal definition of multiplicity based on the operator . In connection with∈ the first Idea of multiplicity, the thesis exposes - with references to Martin Heidegger and Plato - Badiou's conceptual transposition of the couple one/multiple on the couple existence/being and defines the fundamental concepts of his ontology - the situation, the presentation, the representation and the void, with the help of which Badiou interprets..