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The Mathematical Imagination is an archaeology of the undeveloped potential of mathematics for critical theory. As Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno first conceived of the critical project in the 1930s, critical theory steadfastly opposed the mathematization of thought. Mathematics flattened thought into a dangerous positivism that led reason to the barbarism of the Second World War. The Mathematical Imagination challenges this narrative and argues that it has obscured how mathematics provided three lesser-known German-Jewish thinkers—Gershom Scholem, Franz Rosenzweig, and Siegfried Kracauer—with metaphors to negotiate the crises of modernity during the Weimar Republic. Their theories of poetry, messianism, and cultural critique borrowed ideas from the philosophy of mathematics, infinitesimal calculus, and geometry in order to refashion cultural and aesthetic discourse. Drawn to the austerity and muteness of mathematics, these friends and forerunners of the Frankfurt School found in mathematical approaches to negativity strategies to capture the marginalized experiences and perspectives of Jews in Germany. This vocabulary, in which theory could be both mathematical and critical, is missing in the intellectual history of critical theory—from the work of second-generation critical theorists such as Jürgen Habermas to contemporary critiques of technology. Building on the work of Martin Jay and Susan Buck-Morss, The Mathematical Imagination shows how Scholem, Rosenzweig, and Kracauer’s engagement with mathematics uncovers a more capacious vision of the critical project, one with tools that can help us confront and intervene in our digital, and increasingly mathematical, present.

The Treatise on Consequences contains the most important treatment of logical consequence in the middle ages. Buridan was a philosopher working at the University of Paris in the mid-fourteenth century. The rediscovery of Aristotle’s logical works in the late twelfth century led to a revival and fresh development of logical theory, culminating in Buridan’s general treatment in the Treatise on Consequences. He gives a novel treatment of the categorical syllogism based on the notion of distribution, which laid the basis of the theory of the syllogism in traditional logic in succeeding centuries. He gives a general account of the modal terms ‘necessary’, ‘possible’ and ‘contingent’, proceeding to an entirely original treatment of modal syllogisms free from the problems that beset Aristotle’s modal syllogism. In particular, he gives a coherent account of the “ampliation” of the subject of divided modal propositions to the possible and setting out their logical inter-relationships systematically. The Latin text was edited from the three extant manuscripts in the 1970s, and was first translated into English in 1985. This entirely new translation aims for a more accurate and clearer rendering of Buridan’s text, and is accompanied by a substantial introduction outlining the context of Buridan’s treatment and explaining in detail his arguments and his theoretical position.

Focusing on the first four images of the Other mobilized in René Descartes’ Meditations—namely, the blind, the mad, the dreamy, and the bad—Reading Descartes Otherwise casts light on what have heretofore been the phenomenological shadows of “Cartesian rationality.” In doing so, it discovers dynamic signs of spectral alterity lodged both at the core and on the edges of modern Cartesian subjectivity. Calling for a Copernican reorientation of the very notion “Cartesianism,” the book's series of close, creatively critical readings of Descartes’ signature images brings the dramatic forces, moments, and scenes of the cogito into our own contemporary moment. While unravelling the knotted skeins of ambiguity that have been spun within philosophical modernity out of such clichés as “Descartes, the abstract modern subject” and “Descartes, the father of modern philosophy,” the analysis highlights a figure who is at once everywhere and nowhere, a living Cartesian ghost. This effort at revitalizing and reframing the legacy of Cartesian modernity, in a way mindful of its proto-phenomenological traces, also involves reflecting on some of the trends in contemporary Cartesian scholarship while putting Descartes in dialogue with a host of twentieth century and contemporary Continental philosophers ranging from Edmund Husserl, Gaston Bachelard and Maurice Merleau-Ponty to Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jean-Luc Marion, and Alain Badiou among others.

In Process and Reality and other works, Alfred North Whitehead struggled to come to terms with the impact the new science of quantum mechanics would have on metaphysics. This book is the first extended analysis of the intricate relationships between relativity theory, quantum mechanics, and Whitehead's cosmology. Illuminated here is the intersection of science and philosophy in Whitehead's work, and details of Whitehead's attempts to fashion an ontology coherent with quantum anomalies. Including a non-specialist introduction to quantum mechanics, the book adds an essential new dimension to our understanding of Whitehead.