"Alain Badiou is considered by many people to be the most important continental philosopher of our time and the last of the great philosophers who came of age in France in the 1960s, a peer of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. But unlike those poststructuralist thinkers, who disavow claims to truth as mere ideology, Badiou argues that philosophy is centrally invested in the reality of truth. His philosophy addresses the question of how a new truth comes into the world--that is, how does a field of human activity, such as politics, art, science, or even the most intimate love between individuals, produce a truth that is both specific to its time and place and universal, available to all people? According to Badiou, truth is not merely the representation of a fact with a high degree of certainty, but a creative and collaborative process through which a new world--a new set of possibilities for thinking, making, and doing--emerges. This new truth he calls the event, and the process by which it occurs is the rupture. In his seminar on Parmenides, Alain Badiou gives us an up-close look at what philosophy actually is. Philosophy was a radically new discipline at the time of Parmenides (late sixth or early fifth century BCE), not only because he explored the question of being and nonbeing but because, in spite of being expressed in the form of a poem, his thought was built on the universal exactitude of mathematics, also developing in Greece at the time. In his seminar Badiou claims Parmenides as the progenitor of his own thinking about ontology, contra Plato and later Hegel and Heidegger, as multiple rather than unitary and truth as expressed in mathematics"--.