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This essay utilises Suzanne Bachelard's essay 'Forme et Contenu' as an entry point to sketch out the possibility (or impossibility) of a dialectic of mathemata following the work of Jean Cavaillès and Jean Hyppolite. Firstly, I outline what Bachelard sees as a 'dialectic' of form and content in the history of abstract algebra, highlighting a parallel between Bachelard's reading of algebra and Hyppolite reading of the relation of the human subject to logos. Secondly, I move towards Jean Hyppolite's discussion of Lautman in 'Mathematical Thought' which allows for a revealing of convergences between the work of Hyppolite and Cavaillès. I conclude by noting that the similarities between Cavaillès and Hyppolite – despite possible protestations by Hyppolite – go against Hegel's understanding of mathematics, leading to the possibility of opening up a 'Hegelian mathematics against Hegel'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his recently published 1975–76 seminar on Life Death (§3), Jacques Derrida offers a severe critique of French epistemologists and philosophers of life. On Derrida's view, they do not seem to be concerned with the question of the metaphoricity of metaphor but, rather, by taking the epistemological cut between (inadequate) metaphors and (adequate) concepts for granted, they explain the scientific process as a movement of critical rectification of metaphors by concepts. Moreover, they do not engage with Nietzsche seriously. Here I build on this last point to examine the project of accounting for the very condition of the scientific process that Derrida puts forward in 'White Mythology' (1971) and Life Death. My reading hypothesis is that this project rests on Derrida's original interpretation of Nietzsche's Darwinian-type genesis of thinking, according to which selective reproduction consists in the metaphoricity of metaphor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the conjunction of French historical epistemology and Lacanian theory in postwar France. In particular, Lacan's account of scientific formalization is scrutinized insofar as it develops aspects of the prior epistemological research of Gaston Bachelard, whose innovative approach to the problem of the nature and limits of scientific knowledge proved so influential on the subsequent field of French structuralism. Lacan's reflections on formalization will be shown, in contrast to Bachelard, to place an emphasis on the constitutive and limiting role of language in its interaction with logical and scientific projects. In asking how Lacan's structural psychoanalysis extends and subverts the rationalist emphasis of French philosophy of science, I hope to provide a new optic through which to assess the role of formalization in critical theory today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]