Answer by Waldemar for Has philosophy ever clarified mathematics?
George Berkeley’s „The Analyst” is an example. Berkeley was a philosopher. He had a philosophical motivation. He attacked a mathematical concept of “Infinitesimals”. He clarified that an original...
View ArticleAnswer by Walter Mitty for Has philosophy ever clarified mathematics?
There is a book that gained a cult following in the 1970s, and this book lies at the intersection of philosophy and mathematics. It's Laws of Form by G Spencer Brown. Few serious mathematicians have...
View ArticleAnswer by Liviu Nicolaescu for Has philosophy ever clarified mathematics?
I am very skeptical of a philosopher talking about Math, given the unavoidable interpretative elasticity of the philosophical discourse and the blunders of some of its practitioners. (Hegel's name...
View ArticleAnswer by djechlin for Has philosophy ever clarified mathematics?
Two points: one, firstly understanding mathematical processes can be of immense pedagogical value. See e.g. Polya's How to Solve It (and he wrote a more academic book with these themes), or...
View ArticleAnswer by Joel David Hamkins for Has philosophy ever clarified mathematics?
I find the case of Alan Turing's development of the concept of computatibility to be an example. Before Turing, the logicians had no clear concept of what it means to say that a function is computable....
View ArticleAnswer by abx for Has philosophy ever clarified mathematics?
From this article in Wikipedia : "La Géométrie was published in 1637 as an appendix to Discours de la méthode (Discourse on Method), written by René Descartes. In the Discourse, he presents his method...
View ArticleHas philosophy ever clarified mathematics?
I've recently been reading some standard textbooks on the philosophy of mathematics, and I've become quite frustrated that (surely due to my own limitations) I don't seem to be gleaning any...
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