… A characteristic of Schmid’s effort is his wide-ranging spectrum of references, from the very Masters of mathematical thought (Poincaré, Hilbert, Mac Lane, Thom, Grothendieck, Connes, Voevodsky, etc.), to profound epistemologists (Piaget, Kripke, Simondon, Deleuze, Petitot, etc.), to some of the most exciting new thinkers of the 21st century (Negarestani, Laruelle). The many mathematical fields traversed by Schmid (mathematical logic, set theory, category theory, to-pology, number theory, algebraic geometry, differential geometry), show his desire to provide a working «foundational system which conceptually unifies ordinary mathematics …
Co-edited by Ben Green, with forewords by Rocco Gangle, Will Fraser, Michael Stumpf, Connor Tomaka, Fernando Zalamea, afterwords by Alexander Boland, Laszlo Horvath, Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, Inigo Wilkins, Tim Pierson and postscript by Mattin.
The apparent primary goal of Eric’s treatise is to define something called ‘the Real’, with the help of a patchwork of theoretical materials drawn from contemporary mathematics, mathematical physics, ‘neurophysics’ and continental theory. Other topics in the text, especially those dealing with genesis and manifestation, seem relevant to Eric’s conception of total art, which refines the spirit of Fluxus for the contemporary moment under the heading of ‘minor rationalism’. ––Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix
How could one reconcile the proposition of univalent foundations in mathematics and the traces of activity marked by the proper name of Dieter Roth? Could the formal inventions of the former help elaborate the field of the latter? The Prolegomenon begins to establish some compelling coordinates by which one could begin to approach such a question. Could one carry such formalizing work forward? As a text with foundational aspirations, what would the status of such work be? ––Tim Pierson
In my view, what is most important in Schmid’s treatise is how it exercises a panoply of important sections from contemporary philosophy, science and mathematics in order to suggest how the epistemic relation between ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’ that is manifest, in particular, in type theory (especially its timely homotopic incarnation) may be constructively employed and made effective without having to ground itself in correspondence to any correlative ontological relation between ‘form’ and ‘matter’. ––Rocco Gangle
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