Alain Badiou is rapidly emerging as one of the most radical and influential philosophers of our time. Badiou opposes the contemporary reduction of philosophy to nothing but a matter of language and premature announcements of the end of philosophy and thus sets himself against both analytic and continental modes of philosophy.<br> <br> Setting the traditional platonic concerns of philosophy, truth and being, against the modern sophists of postmodernism, Badiou has articulated a powerful systematic philosophy with profound ethical and political consequences.