Jean Cavaillès: A Necessary Becoming

To mark the publication of a new translation of Jean Cavaillès’s <a href="https://www.urbanomic.com/book/logic-theory-science/"><em>On Logic and the Theory of Science</em></a>, Robin Mackay is joined by Knox Peden and Matt Hare to provide an introduction to Cavaillès's philosophical project for the uninitiated, and to examine what is at stake in <em>On Logic</em>’s confrontation with Kantianism, logicism, and Husserlian phenomenology. Among the many subjects covered in this wide-ranging conversation: optimism, extreme protestantism, and Spinozism; Heidegger and Cassirer’s Davos debate; mathematics as a necessary dynamism; the virtues and vices of phenomenology; philosophical style and the ethics of concision; foucault, archaeology, and the historical a priori; life and rational activity; abnegation in life and in thought; Cavaillès’s philosophical legacy and how reading his work ‘fundamentally changes our understanding of 20th-Century French philosophy’. Music: ‘23’ from Newtables by SND (SNDSE2)