Wednesday, January 16, 2013

New from Urbanomic: Zalamea - Synthentic Philosophy of Contemporary Mathematics


From a global perspective, Zalamea's book is a defining moment in the enduring legacy of Universalist knowledge, comparable in its historical significance to the works of Oresme, Peirce and Lautman. It outlines contemporary mathematics as a germinal edifice that, far from restricting or moderating various local fields of knowledge, broadens and deepens the scope of synthesis and fusion between them, laying out the foundations of a rational knowledge as a transit system endowed with universal orientation - a plastic, bottomless-up protean meshwork where mathematics is free from a fixed framework, and synthetic philosophy is philosophy in the making. - Reza Negarestani 

From the Urbanomic website:
In Synthetic Philosophy of Contemporary Mathematics, Fernando Zalamea (Professor of Mathematics, Universidad Nacional de Colombia) offers the reader a panoramic view of the vast spectrum of modern and contemporary mathematics, and the new philosophical possibilities they suggest.
The predominant analytic approach, with its focus on the formal, the elementary and the foundational, has effectively divorced philosophy from the real practice of mathematics and the profound conceptual shifts in the discipline over the last century...

Drawing on these concrete examples, [Zalamea] proposes some generic outlines for synthesis. Oriented by a unique philosophical constellation (Peirce, Lautman, Merleau-Ponty), Zalamea uses this survey of mathematical experience to set out the program for a sophisticated new epistemology, one that will avail itself of the powerful conceptual instruments forged by the mathematical mind, but which have until now remained largely neglected by philosophers.

Synthetic Philosophy of Contemporary Mathematics is a unique and unprecedented book, and a much needed one. The book makes available to the inquisitive non-specialist the conceptual transformations and intellectual orientations of modern and contemporary mathematics, and their significance for speculative philosophical thought.

Zalamea's book serves as a conceptual introduction to mathematical themes rarely discussed outside specialist circles, and as a critical lens by means of which today's mathematics may aid us in the configuration of new cultural perspectives.

If analytic philosophy was forged in the fires of set theory and classical logic at the beginning of the twentieth century, then today, at the dawn of the twenty-first, and around the scaffolding of category theory and the logic of sheaves, it is time for a complementary, synthetic philosophy to be built.
Link HERE.