Description
Book SynopsisThis volume focuses on the importance of historical enquiry for the appreciation of philosophical problems concerning mathematics. It contains a well-balanced mixture of contributions by internationally established experts, such as Jeremy Gray and Jens Hoyrup; upcoming scholars, such as Erich Reck and Dirk Schlimm; and young, promising researchers at the beginning of their careers. The book is situated within a relatively new and broadly naturalistic tradition in the philosophy of mathematics. In this alternative philosophical current, which has been dramatically growing in importance in the last few decades, unlike in the traditional schools, proper attention is paid to scientific practices as informing for philosophical accounts.
Table of ContentsTowards an Informed Argument from Geometry (H De Cruz); Whitehead, The Serpent in Russell's Paradise (R Desmet); A Mathematician and a Philosopher on the Science-Likeness of Mathematics (E Glas); Nineteenth-Century Analysis as a Philosophy of Mathematics (J Gray); On the Origin and Nature of Algebraic Symbolism (A Heeffer); What Did the Abacus Teachers Really Do When They (Sometimes) Ended Up Doing Mathematics? (J Hoyrup); Representations as Means and Ends (H Kragh Sorensen); Diagrammatic Reasoning in Euclid's Elements (D Macbeth); Reading Diophantos (A Meskens); Philosophical Method and Galileo's Paradox of Infinity (M Parker); Bridging Theorems with Axioms: Boole, Stone, and Tarski (D Schlimm); Dedekind, Structural Reasoning and Mathematical Understanding (E Reck).
