Download or read book Philosophical Aspects of Symbolic Reasoning in Early Modern Mathematics written by Albrecht Heeffer and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The novel use of symbolism in early modern mathematics poses both philosophical and historical questions. How can we trace its development and transmission through manuscript sources? Is it intrinsically related to the emergence of symbolic algebra? How does symbolism relate to the use of diagrams? What are the consequences of symbolic reasoning on our understanding of nature? Can a symbolic language enable new forms of reasoning? Does a universal symbolic language exists which enables us to express all knowledge? This book brings together a collection of papers that address all these and related questions ? which were initially posed on a conference held in Ghent (Belgium) in August 2009. Scholars working on philosophy of science, history of philosophy and history of mathematics provide an insight into the role and function of symbolic representations in the development of early modern mathematics. The papers cover the period from early abbaco arithmetic and algebra (14th century) up to Leibniz (early 18th century).
Download or read book A Material History of Medieval and Early Modern Ciphers written by Katherine Ellison and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-14 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first cultural history of early modern cryptography, this collection brings together scholars in history, literature, music, the arts, mathematics, and computer science who study ciphering and deciphering from new materialist, media studies, cognitive studies, disability studies, and other theoretical perspectives. Essays analyze the material forms of ciphering as windows into the cultures of orality, manuscript, print, and publishing, revealing that early modern ciphering, and the complex history that preceded it in the medieval period, not only influenced political and military history but also played a central role in the emergence of the capitalist media state in the West, in religious reformation, and in the scientific revolution. Ciphered communication, whether in etched stone and bone, in musical notae, runic symbols, polyalphabetic substitution, algebraic equations, graphic typographies, or literary metaphors, took place in contested social spaces and offered a means of expression during times of political, economic, and personal upheaval. Ciphering shaped the early history of linguistics as a discipline, and it bridged theological and scientific rhetoric before and during the Reformation. Ciphering was an occult art, a mathematic language, and an aesthetic that influenced music, sculpture, painting, drama, poetry, and the early novel. This collection addresses gaps in cryptographic history, but more significantly, through cultural analyses of the rhetorical situations of ciphering and actual solved and unsolved medieval and early modern ciphers, it traces the influences of cryptographic writing and reading on literacy broadly defined as well as the cultures that generate, resist, and require that literacy. This volume offers a significant contribution to the history of the book, highlighting the broader cultural significance of textual materialities.
Download or read book Selected Essays on Pre and Early Modern Mathematical Practice written by Jens Høyrup and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-09-20 with total page 969 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a broad selection of articles mainly published during the last two decades on a variety of topics within the history of mathematics, mostly focusing on particular aspects of mathematical practice. This book is of interest to, and provides methodological inspiration for, historians of science or mathematics and students of these disciplines.
Download or read book Algorithmic Modernity written by Morgan G. Ames and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-24 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The rhetoric of algorithmic neutrality is more alive than ever-why? This volume explores key moments in the historical emergence of algorithmic practices and in the constitution of their credibility and authority since 1500. If algorithms are historical objects and their associated meanings and values are situated and contingent-and if we are to push back against rhetorical claims of otherwise-then the genealogical investigation this book offers is essential to understand the power of the algorithm. The fact that algorithms create the conditions for many of our encounters with social reality contrasts starkly with their relative invisibility. More than other artifacts, algorithms are easily black-boxed. Rather than contingent and modifiable, they are widely seen as obvious and unproblematic-without context and without history. As an antidote, this volume keeps a clear focus on the emergence and continuous reconstitution of algorithmic practices alongside the ascendance of modernity. Its essays highlight the trajectory of an algorithmic modernity, one characterized by attitudes and practices that are best emblematized by the modernist aesthetic and inhuman efficacy of the algorithm. The volume moves from early modern algorithmic practices, centered on heuristics for arithmetic operations, emphasizing ruptures, shifts, and variations across times and cultures. By the age of Enlightenment, the term algorithm had come to signify any process of systematic calculation that could be carried out mechanically, but its meaning and implications are still distant from those familiar to us . It's in the nineteenth and twentieth century that the meaning of algorithm is sharpened through a new discipline and by adding sets of specific conditions-such as the condition of finiteness-which acquire new and crucial significance in the age of digital computing. Throughout, the connection between algorithms and modernity is one of our central concerns. Through detailed historical reconstructions of specific moments, thinkers, and cultural phenomena over the last five hundred years, these essays lead us to the definitions of algorithm most legible today and to the pervasiveness of both algorithmic procedures and rhetoric. This volume contributes a multi-faceted exploration of the genealogies of algorithms, of algorithmic thinking, and of the distinctly modernist faith in algorithms as neutral tools that merely illuminate the natural and social world"--
Download or read book Journal of Early Modern Studies Volume 2 Issue 1 Spring 2013 written by Jalobeanu, Dana and published by Zeta Books. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book De Sphaera of Johannes de Sacrobosco in the Early Modern Period written by Matteo Valleriani and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-01-01 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access book explores commentaries on an influential text of pre-Copernican astronomy in Europe. It features essays that take a close look at key intellectuals and how they engaged with the main ideas of this qualitative introduction to geocentric cosmology. Johannes de Sacrobosco compiled his Tractatus de sphaera during the thirteenth century in the frame of his teaching activities at the then recently founded University of Paris. It soon became a mandatory text all over Europe. As a result, a tradition of commentaries to the text was soon established and flourished until the second half of the 17th century. Here, readers will find an informative overview of these commentaries complete with a rich context. The essays explore the educational and social backgrounds of the writers. They also detail how their careers developed after the publication of their commentaries, the institutions and patrons they were affiliated with, what their agenda was, and whether and how they actually accomplished it. The editor of this collection considers these scientific commentaries as genuine scientific works. The contributors investigate them here not only in reference to the work on which it comments but also, and especially, as independent scientific contributions that are socially, institutionally, and intellectually contextualized around their authors.
Download or read book Contemporary Materialism Its Ontology and Epistemology written by Gustavo E. Romero and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-06-01 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an up-to-date revision of materialism’s central tenets, its main varieties, and the place of materialistic philosophy vis a vis scientific knowledge. Materialism has been the subject of extensive and rich controversies since Robert Boyle introduced the term for the first time in the 17th century. But what is materialism and what can it offer today? The term is usually defined as the worldview according to which everything real is material. Nevertheless, there is no philosophical consensus about whether the meaning of matter can be enlarged beyond the physical. As a consequence, materialism is often defined in stark exclusive and reductionist terms: whatever exists is either physical or ontologically reducible to it. This conception, if consistent, mutilates reality, excluding the ontological significance of political, economic, sociocultural, anthropological and psychological realities. Starting from a new history of materialism, the present book focuses on the central ontological and epistemological debates aroused by today’s leading materialist approaches, including some little known to an anglophone readership. The key concepts of matter, system, emergence, space and time, life, mind, and software are checked over and updated. Controversial issues such as the nature of mathematics and the place of reductionism are also discussed from different materialist approaches. As a result, materialism emerges as a powerful, indispensable scientifically-supported worldview with a surprising wealth of nuances and possibilities.
Download or read book Research in History and Philosophy of Mathematics written by Maria Zack and published by Birkhäuser. This book was released on 2017-12-18 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume contains fourteen papers that were presented at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the Canadian Society for History and Philosophy of Mathematics/La Société Canadienne d’Histoire et de Philosophie des Mathématiques, held at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada. In addition to showcasing rigorously reviewed modern scholarship on an interesting variety of topics in the history and philosophy of mathematics, this meeting also honored the life and work of the logician and philosopher of mathematics Aldo Antonelli (1962-2015). The first four papers in this book are part of that remembrance and have a philosophical focus. Included in these are a discussion of Bolzano’s objections to Kant’s philosophy of mathematics and an examination of the influence of rhetorical and poetic aesthetics on the development of symbols in the 16th and 17th Centuries. The remaining papers deal with the history of mathematics and cover such subjects as Early schemes for polar ordinates in the work of L’Hôpital, based on lessons given to him by Bernoulli A method devised by Euler for determining if a number is a sum of two squares Playfair’s Axiom and what it reveals about the history of 19th-Century mathematics education The modern library classification system for mathematical subjects An exploration of various examples of sundials throughout Paris Written by leading scholars in the field, these papers are accessible to not only mathematicians and students of the history and philosophy of mathematics, but also anyone with a general interest in mathematics.
Download or read book Formal Languages in Logic written by Catarina Dutilh Novaes and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-08 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the cognitive impact on formal languages for human reasoning, drawing on philosophy, historical development, psychology and cognitive science.
Download or read book Arguing with Numbers written by James Wynn and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2021-05-14 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As discrete fields of inquiry, rhetoric and mathematics have long been considered antithetical to each other. That is, if mathematics explains or describes the phenomena it studies with certainty, persuasion is not needed. This volume calls into question the view that mathematics is free of rhetoric. Through nine studies of the intersections between these two disciplines, Arguing with Numbers shows that mathematics is in fact deeply rhetorical. Using rhetoric as a lens to analyze mathematically based arguments in public policy, political and economic theory, and even literature, the essays in this volume reveal how mathematics influences the values and beliefs with which we assess the world and make decisions and how our worldviews influence the kinds of mathematical instruments we construct and accept. In addition, contributors examine how concepts of rhetoric—such as analogy and visuality—have been employed in mathematical and scientific reasoning, including in the theorems of mathematical physicists and the geometrical diagramming of natural scientists. Challenging academic orthodoxy, these scholars reject a math-equals-truth reduction in favor of a more constructivist theory of mathematics as dynamic, evolving, and powerfully persuasive. By bringing these disparate lines of inquiry into conversation with one another, Arguing with Numbers provides inspiration to students, established scholars, and anyone inside or outside rhetorical studies who might be interested in exploring the intersections between the two disciplines. In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume are Catherine Chaput, Crystal Broch Colombini, Nathan Crick, Michael Dreher, Jeanne Fahnestock, Andrew C. Jones, Joseph Little, and Edward Schiappa.
Download or read book Handbook of the History and Philosophy of Mathematical Practice written by Bharath Sriraman and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 3221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy written by Burt Hopkins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-09-20 with total page 946 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Volume XVIII Special Issue: Gian-Carlo Rota and The End of Objectivity, 2019 Aim and Scope: The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy provides an annual international forum for phenomenological research in the spirit of Husserl's groundbreaking work and the extension of this work by such figures as Scheler, Heidegger, Sartre, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty and Gadamer. Contributors: Gabriele Baratelli, Stefania Centrone, Giovanna C. Cifoletti, Jean-Marie Coquard, Steven Crowell, Deborah De Rosa, Daniele De Santis, Nicolas de Warren, Agnese Di Riccio, Aurélien Djian, Yuval Dolev, Mirja Hartimo, Burt C. Hopkins, Talia Leven, Ah Hyun Moon, Luis Niel, Fabrizio Palombi, Mario Ariel González Porta, Gian-Carlo Rota, Michael Roubach, Franco Trabattoni and Michele Vagnetti. Submissions: Manuscripts, prepared for blind review, should be submitted to the Editors ([email protected] and [email protected]) electronically via e-mail attachments.
Download or read book The World of the Abbaco written by Jens Høyrup and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2024 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy written by Marco Sgarbi and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-10-27 with total page 3618 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gives accurate and reliable summaries of the current state of research. It includes entries on philosophers, problems, terms, historical periods, subjects and the cultural context of Renaissance Philosophy. Furthermore, it covers Latin, Arabic, Jewish, Byzantine and vernacular philosophy, and includes entries on the cross-fertilization of these philosophical traditions. A unique feature of this encyclopedia is that it does not aim to define what Renaissance philosophy is, rather simply to cover the philosophy of the period between 1300 and 1650.
Download or read book Making and Breaking Mathematical Sense written by Roi Wagner and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-10 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In line with the emerging field of philosophy of mathematical practice, this book pushes the philosophy of mathematics away from questions about the reality and truth of mathematical entities and statements and toward a focus on what mathematicians actually do—and how that evolves and changes over time. How do new mathematical entities come to be? What internal, natural, cognitive, and social constraints shape mathematical cultures? How do mathematical signs form and reform their meanings? How can we model the cognitive processes at play in mathematical evolution? And how does mathematics tie together ideas, reality, and applications? Roi Wagner uniquely combines philosophical, historical, and cognitive studies to paint a fully rounded image of mathematics not as an absolute ideal but as a human endeavor that takes shape in specific social and institutional contexts. The book builds on ancient, medieval, and modern case studies to confront philosophical reconstructions and cutting-edge cognitive theories. It focuses on the contingent semiotic and interpretive dimensions of mathematical practice, rather than on mathematics' claim to universal or fundamental truths, in order to explore not only what mathematics is, but also what it could be. Along the way, Wagner challenges conventional views that mathematical signs represent fixed, ideal entities; that mathematical cognition is a rigid transfer of inferences between formal domains; and that mathematics’ exceptional consensus is due to the subject’s underlying reality. The result is a revisionist account of mathematical philosophy that will interest mathematicians, philosophers, and historians of science alike.
Download or read book The Best Writing on Mathematics 2015 written by Mircea Pitici and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-12 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The year's finest writing on mathematics from around the world This annual anthology brings together the year's finest mathematics writing from around the world. Featuring promising new voices alongside some of the foremost names in the field, The Best Writing on Mathematics 2015 makes available to a wide audience many articles not easily found anywhere else—and you don’t need to be a mathematician to enjoy them. These writings offer surprising insights into the nature, meaning, and practice of mathematics today. They delve into the history, philosophy, teaching, and everyday occurrences of math, and take readers behind the scenes of today’s hottest mathematical debates. Here David Hand explains why we should actually expect unlikely coincidences to happen; Arthur Benjamin and Ethan Brown unveil techniques for improvising custom-made magic number squares; Dana Mackenzie describes how mathematicians are making essential contributions to the development of synthetic biology; Steven Strogatz tells us why it’s worth writing about math for people who are alienated from it; Lisa Rougetet traces the earliest written descriptions of Nim, a popular game of mathematical strategy; Scott Aaronson looks at the unexpected implications of testing numbers for randomness; and much, much more. In addition to presenting the year’s most memorable writings on mathematics, this must-have anthology includes a bibliography of other notable writings and an introduction by the editor, Mircea Pitici. This book belongs on the shelf of anyone interested in where math has taken us—and where it is headed.
Download or read book British Versions of Book II of Euclid s Elements Geometry Arithmetic Algebra 1550 1750 written by Leo Corry and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-09-12 with total page 79 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses the changing conceptions about the relationship between geometry and arithmetic within the Euclidean tradition that developed in the British context of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Its focus is on Book II of the Elements and the ways in which algebraic symbolism and methods, especially as recently introduced by François Viète and his followers, took center stage as mediators between the two realms, and thus offered new avenues to work out that relationship in idiosyncratic ways not found in earlier editions of the Euclidean text. Texts examined include Robert Recorde's Pathway to Knowledge (1551), Henry Billingsley’s first English translation of the Elements (1570), Clavis Mathematicae by William Oughtred and Artis Analyticae Praxis by Thomas Harriot (both published in 1631), Isaac Barrow’s versions of the Elements (1660), and John Wallis Treatise of Algebra (1685), and the English translations of Claude Dechales’ French Euclidean Elements (1685). This book offers a completely new perspective of the topic and analyzes mostly unexplored material. It will be of interest to historians of mathematics, mathematicians with an interest in history and historians of renaissance science in general.
