Fernando Zalamea

A panoramic survey of the vast spectrum of modern and contemporary mathematics and the new philosophical possibilities they suggest. A panoramic survey of the vast spectrum of modern and contemporary mathematics and the new philosophical possibilities they suggest, this book gives the inquisitive non-specialist an insight into the conceptual transformations and intellectual orientations of modern and contemporary mathematics. 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. The first part discusses the specificity of modern (1830-1950) and contemporary (1950 to the present) mathematics, and reviews the failure of mainstream philosophy of mathematics to address this specificity. Building on the work of the few exceptional thinkers to have engaged with the "real mathematics" of their era (including Lautman, Deleuze, Badiou, de Lorenzo and Châtelet), Zalamea challenges philosophy's self-imposed ignorance of the "making of mathematics." In the second part, thirteen detailed case studies examine the greatest creators in the field, mapping the central advances accomplished in mathematics over the last half-century, exploring in vivid detail the characteristic creative gestures of modern master Grothendieck and contemporary creators including Lawvere, Shelah, Connes, and Freyd. Drawing on these concrete examples, and oriented by a unique philosophical constellation (Peirce, Lautman, Merleau-Ponty), in the third part Zalamea sets 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

A dynamic critical and philosophical study of modern North American and Latin American cultures via art, architecture, philosophy and mathematics. With an unprecedented ease of movement between literature, music, art, architecture, mathematics, and philosophy, this richly illustrated study enters into the "electromagnetic field" between Latin America and North America with two complementary essays examining some of the principal features of their intellectual and creative landscapes throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. "Under the Sign of Jonah" explores how nineteenth-century North American culture adopted and transformed the legacy of romanticism, with sensitive readings of the work of Herman Melville, Albert Pinkham Ryder, and Charles Sanders Peirce among others, before turning to the continued presence of romantic problematics in Edgar Varèse’s music, Frank Gehry’s architecture, and the conceptual mathematics of William Lawvere. "The Borders and the Pendulum" addresses Latin America as a margin in continual dialogue with 'major' culture, detailing the movement from a universalist panoscopy which imagined an integrated American culture to a mid-century microscopy focused on the regional, to late twentieth-century responses to postmodernism in the form of a telescopy that operates both a differentiation into the local and a transversal integration into universal modernity. Continually shuttling across disciplinary borders, Zalamea approaches his subjects with a philosophical depth and conceptual agility that is a mark of the true polymath; his thought-diagrams of a dynamic continent are an indispensable guide to the transits and syntheses not only between the Americas, but between the romantic, the modern, and the contemporary, supplying the attentive reader with all the equipment they need to venture off the beaten paths of (post)modernity.

Fernando Zalamea

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