It's official: Fernando Zalamea will be delivering a long-awaited English-language seminar on his recent work at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht (The Netherlands) this September, through the Versus Laboratory. As some of this blog's readers may know, I'm currently working on a translation of his 2009 book, Filosofía sintética de las matemáticas contemporaneas, for Urbanomic press, a few chapters of which we'll be reading for the seminar. Zalamea is an extraordinarily original philosopher with a vision of mathematical activity as deep and sweeping as any philosopher since Albert Lautman. If the resurgence of the mathematical condition into contemporary 'continental' philosophy is something that interests you, then this seminar is well worth the train to Maastricht. Like all JVE events, admission is free and open to the public. Here is the announcement from the Versus Laboratory page:
Sheaf Logic & Philosophical Synthesis
Thursday 29 September 2011
14h to 17h Auditorium
Fernando Zalamea (Universidad Nacional de Columbia), philosopher and mathematician, will illustrate how today’s sheaf logic carries a potential to revolutionize contemporary philosophical practice in a manner no less radical than the force with which the early 20th Century formalization of classical logic conditioned the practice of Analytic Philosophy. In particular, we will study a series of Grothendieck transformations of mathematical concepts, and come to understand how analogous procedures may be employed to the end of overturning a number of traditional philosophical polarities (realism/idealism, statics/dynamics, form/content, etc.).
Texts: Fernando ZALAMEA, Synthetic Philosophy of Contemporary Mathematics, trans. Z.L. Fraser, London: Urbanomic, 2012. Chapters 4, 8 and 9. Copies of the readings will be made available here at the end of August.
Information on the book (forthcoming from Urbanomic) can be found here.
* In other Zalamea-related news, Reza Negarestani has recently mentioned plans for a series of introductory posts on Zalamea's work on his own blog, Eliminative Culinarism, which I highly recommend readers of this blog take a look at when they're up. Zalamea also has an article in the most recent volume of COLLAPSE, which I'm still waiting to get my hands on. [[UPDATE: NEGARESTANI'S INTRODUCTORY POST ON ZALAMEA'S PROJECT IS NOW UP, AND CAN BE FOUND HERE.]]
