Huh.
Well, some preliminary comments to demonstrate my curiosity yet also my suspicion, in response to some of his comments:
I'm not sure why he assumes it's so shocking. I actually think it makes a lot of sense.
For what it's worth, I fucking love reading about math even though I have little understanding of the specifics. I'm fascinated by early-twentieth-century mathematics and the fallout of logical positivism, as Wittgenstein's Tractatus all but spelled out its doom. I think the mathematical quandaries that arose from the work of David Hilbert, Kurt Gödel, and Alan Turing are some of the most interesting and substantial breakthroughs in the history of modern science. Why do "post-Heideggerian Comparative Lit departments" need to be shocked or perturbed by this, or even doubt the relevance of such discoveries?
Furthermore, I'm not over-generalizing by projecting my own fascination onto the majority of humanities scholars. If anyone bothers to actually talk with humanities scholars about mathematics, they'll find at worst indifference, and at best affirmation (my dissertation advisor has an undergraduate degree in mathematics, in fact). Our current Buzzfeed golden boy, Ted Chiang, wrote that a "proof that mathematics is inconsistent, and that all its wondrous beauty was just an illusion, would, it seemed to me, be one of the worst things you could ever learn." Deleuze, Derrida, and Lacan were all interested with mathematics, and not with the notion that it was a "social construct" (I get really tired of this being the go-to criticism of the humanities, by the way).
Deleuze and Guattari write that it "was a decisive event when the mathematician Riemann uprooted the multiple from its predicate state and made it a noun, 'multiplicity.' It marked the end of dialectics and the beginning of a typology and topology of multiplicities."
For Derrida and Lacan, mathematics issued a challenge analogous to the one stated in the blog, i.e. the Kantian dilemma of analytic vs. synthetic knowledge. The analogous challenge has to do with language--or more specifically, the subject's relation to the letter:
In other words, Lacan proceeded according to his own brand of positivism; but he went on to incorporate the post-Hilbert rupture of mathematics, what Hilbert called the Entsheidungsproblem, which in turn led to the halting problem and Gödelian incompleteness. For Derrida, mathematics manifests in the uncertainty relation between the spectator and a work of art--a framing problem, or parergon in Derrida's terminology. Mathematicians were fascinated by the question of how to verify solvability; continental philosophers were fascinated by the question of how to verify meaning. It's no coincidence that mathematical language and models found their way into continental thought, since both fields encountered the same dilemma (which yes, has its roots in Kant).
Additionally, Alain Badiou's entire philosophy is built on a reading of Georg Cantor's set theory, and premised on the notion that "mathematics is ontology":
And finally, I'm working on a paper that discusses the relationship between early-20thc mathematics and modernist writing (with which of course the continentals were obsessed). I'm going ahead and providing an excerpt (the paper itself is far from complete):
Given all this, I find samzdat's following comment misguided:
I don't think any notable continental philosopher has forgotten about Kant's influence or the influence of mathematical thought.
Anyway, it's my guess he'll turn eventually to the likes of Hilbert, Gödel, Turing, etc., since these guys basically inaugurated the epistemological crisis of mathematics in the twentieth century.
