Mathematics has stood as a bridge between the Humanities and the Sciences since the days of classical antiquity. For Plato, mathematics was evidence of Being in the midst of Becoming, garden variety evidence apparent even to small children and the unphilosophical, and therefore of the highest educational significance. In the great central similes of The Republic it is the touchstone ofintelligibility for discourse, and in the Timaeus it provides in an oddly literal sense the framework of nature, insuring the intelligibility ofthe material world. For Descartes, mathematical ideas had a clarity...

This book draws its inspiration from Hilbert, Wittgenstein, Cavailles and Lakatos and is designed to reconfigure contemporary philosophy of mathematics by making the growth of knowledge rather than its foundations central to the study of mathematical rationality, and by analyzing the notion of growth in historical as well as logical terms. Not a mere compendium of opinions, it is organised in dialogical forms, with each philosophical thesis answered by one or more historical case studies designed to support, complicate or question it. The first part of the book examines the role of scientific...

Dieser Band fuhrt 16 Aufsatze von Herbert Breger zusammen, die um Leibniz' Arbeiten zur Mathematik und Physik und ihre philosophischen Voraussetzungen kreisen. Drei interessante und ungewohnliche Aspekte stehen hierbei im Vordergrund: Kontinuum, Analysis und Informales. Leibniz' Kontinuum und seine Analysis sind gerade wegen ihres Unterschieds zur heutigen Mathematik interessant. Anhand zahlreicher Beispiele wird ferner die Frage nach dem Verhaltnis zwischen der mathematischen Rationalitat und der Kunst gestellt und die nach den engen Beziehungen zwischen Mathematik und Philosophie bei...