One and Many 

From Zeno to Gorgias to Parmenides, from Plato to Plotinus to Iamblichus, from Roberto Esposito to Gilles Deleuze via Alain Badiou to François Laruelle, from many authors to one and the same problem: what stands in the beginning of everything, the One or the Many, the Monad and the Dyad? What about the Three/Triad?

This course is a philosophical history of the ideas behind both concepts - the One and the Many (or, the Multiple) - and what is their career in histories of human thought. The course will be of interest and use to students interested in various disciplines, from philosophy and cultural studies to mathematics and information sciences, since it deals with some basic patterns of thinking that have generated (the importance of) the concepts.

It will offer a narrative trajectory of the problem of, and the “origin” that lurks behind both the One and the Many and address questions such as: What generates our idealization of either the One or the Many? Why do we privilege one against the other? How do both concepts serve various political and philosophical ideologies? Is it important to commit to either concept, and to what end? Is our commitment to the One or the Many important for building our world-outlook? At what point do people change their perception of the One and the Many, and for what reasons? The trajectory offered in this course will serve students to make sense of their various encounters so far - but also some to come in their future studies and research - with centuries-old dilemmas. One or many worlds? How about the importance of Two, or Three? This type of philosophical counting will help us make sense of order and disorder, chaos and determination, in order to understand what we can do with the One and the Many in and with our lives.