Alain Badiou is emerging as one of the most radical and influential philosophers of our time. He 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. 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. This work provides an overview of Badiou’s work and the intellectual and political context from which it emerges.