The Villa Gillet
Founded in 1987, the Villa Gillet welcomes in Lyon fiction and non-fiction writers, artists and scholars from over the world to ponder issues relevant to our ever shiflting world. The Villa Gillet makes the work of exciting contemporary thinkers accessible to the largest audience possible, by organizing events during the year, and during its festivals : the International Forum on the Novel — happening every year in May since 2007— co-organized with "Le Monde", Walls and Bridges, a ten-day series of events that happened from 2011 to 2013 and Mode d'emploi : un festival des idées — a festival of public debates — initiated in 2012.
In praise of mathematics: a conversation between Alain Badiou and Gilles Haéri
In partnership with Flammarion and Le Bal des Ardents.
Hosted by Gilles Haéri
In The Republic, Plato claims that one cannot discover truths without a lengthy education in mathematics and constantly doing exercises in logic. Only if you refuse to follow prevailing opinions and trust in the truths of which your thinking is a part can you achieve happiness.
This philosophical praise of mathematics begs the question of the relationship between mathematics, truth, and happiness. Is the path clear for anyone armed with the difficult yet luminous knowledge of mathematics, such that the philosophical strategy can say to all human animals: “here is something to convince you that thinking contrary to popular opinion and in the service of a few truths, far from being the ungrateful, vain task you imagine it to be, is the shortest route to real life, which, when it exists, makes itself known through incomparable happiness”? This is the subject of conversation between Alain Badiou and Gilles Haéri.
Reservations are closed. Tickets are available at the box office before the meeting tonight.
