Download or read book Philosophy of Mathematics and Mathematical Practice in the Seventeenth Century written by Paolo Mancosu and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1999 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 1. Philosophy of Mathematics and Mathematical Practice in the Early Seventeenth Century p. 8 1.1 The Quaestio de Certitudine Mathematicarum p. 10 1.2 The Quaestio in the Seventeenth Century p. 15 1.3 The Quaestio and Mathematical Practice p. 24 2. Cavalieri's Geometry of Indivisibles and Guldin's Centers of Gravity p. 34 2.1 Magnitudes, Ratios, and the Method of Exhaustion p. 35 2.2 Cavalieri's Two Methods of Indivisibles p. 38 2.3 Guldin's Objections to Cavalieri's Geometry of Indivisibles p. 50 2.4 Guldin's Centrobaryca and Cavalieri's Objections p. 56 3. Descartes' Geometrie p. 65 3.1 Descartes' Geometrie p. 65 3.2 The Algebraization of Mathematics p. 84 4. The Problem of Continuity p. 92 4.1 Motion and Genetic Definitions p. 94 4.2 The "Causal" Theories in Arnauld and Bolzano p. 100 4.3 Proofs by Contradiction from Kant to the Present p. 105 5. Paradoxes of the Infinite p. 118 5.1 Indivisibles and Infinitely Small Quantities p. 119 5.2 The Infinitely Large p. 129 6. Leibniz's Differential Calculus and Its Opponents p. 150 6.1 Leibniz's Nova Methodus and L'Hopital's Analyse des Infiniment Petits p. 151 6.2 Early Debates with Cluver and Nieuwentijt p. 156 6.3 The Foundational Debate in the Paris Academy of Sciences p. 165 Appendix Giuseppe Biancani's De Mathematicarum Natura p. 178 Notes p. 213 References p. 249 Index p. 267.
Download or read book The Philosophy of Mathematical Practice written by Paolo Mancosu and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2008-06-19 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is an urgent need in philosophy of mathematics for new approaches which pay closer attention to mathematical practice. This book will blaze the trail: it offers philosophical analyses of important characteristics of contemporary mathematics and of many aspects of mathematical activity which escape purely formal logical treatment.
Download or read book The Language of Nature written by Geoffrey Gorham and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2016-06-15 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Galileo’s dictum that the book of nature “is written in the language of mathematics” is emblematic of the accepted view that the scientific revolution hinged on the conceptual and methodological integration of mathematics and natural philosophy. Although the mathematization of nature is a distinctive and crucial feature of the emergence of modern science in the seventeenth century, this volume shows that it was a far more complex, contested, and context-dependent phenomenon than the received historiography has indicated, and that philosophical controversies about the implications of mathematization cannot be understood in isolation from broader social developments related to the status and practice of mathematics in various commercial, political, and academic institutions. Contributors: Roger Ariew, U of South Florida; Richard T. W. Arthur, McMaster U; Lesley B. Cormack, U of Alberta; Daniel Garber, Princeton U; Ursula Goldenbaum, Emory U; Dana Jalobeanu, U of Bucharest; Douglas Jesseph, U of South Florida; Carla Rita Palmerino, Radboud U, Nijmegen and Open U of the Netherlands; Eileen Reeves, Princeton U; Christopher Smeenk, Western U; Justin E. H. Smith, U of Paris 7; Kurt Smith, Bloomsburg U of Pennsylvania.
Download or read book Nominalism and Constructivism in Seventeenth Century Mathematical Philosophy written by David Sepkoski and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-24 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What was the basis for the adoption of mathematics as the primary mode of discourse for describing natural events by a large segment of the philosophical community in the seventeenth century? In answering this question, this book demonstrates that a significant group of philosophers shared the belief that there is no necessary correspondence between external reality and objects of human understanding, which they held to include the objects of mathematical and linguistic discourse. The result is a scholarly reliable, but accessible, account of the role of mathematics in the works of (amongst others) Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Newton, Leibniz, and Berkeley. This impressive volume will benefit scholars interested in the history of philosophy, mathematical philosophy and the history of mathematics.
Download or read book Mathematics in Kant s Critical Philosophy written by Lisa Shabel and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-25 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Download or read book Handbook of the History and Philosophy of Mathematical Practice written by Bharath Sriraman and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 985 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The philosophy of mathematics can be traced back in time to the dawn of mathematics itself. The axiomatization of Euclid in "The Elements" did not hinder innovations in mathematical practice to develop outside the realm of the deductive method. In fact the history of mathematics shows a rich tapestry of practice that include visual, algorithmic, experimental, probabilistic and computational approaches. However the philosophy of mathematics as argued by Imre Lakatos suggests that the innovations and impasses in mathematical practice have remained more or less unacknowledged in philosophy. For instance mathematical argumentation was primarily the domain of theologians and medieval and postmedieval scholastics for over 1700 years after Aristotle. Similarly the study of logic became the purview of mathematical philosophy criticized by Reuben Hersh as "Quinean ping-pong". In two prior Springer books 18 Unconventional Essays on the Nature of Mathematics (Hersh,2006) and Humanizing Mathematics and its Philosophy (Sriraman, 2017), it is sufficiently clear that the philosophy of mathematics is no longer centered around it origins in theology and logic, but influences and is influenced by other domains. Today the philosophy of mathematics can be informed by computer scientists, historians, logicians, linguists, educators, physicists, psychologists, neuroscientists, statisticians and last but not least mathematicians. At the dawn of the 21st century we still have a cadre of scholars influenced first-hand by the likes of Quine and Brouwer, as well as those who were influenced by Imre Lakatos' seminal work Proofs and Refutations (in the 1970s) that espouse the views of practicing mathematicians. Pluralism is the avant-garde term in vogue today suggesting a "post- modern" view of mathematics that would have been frowned upon a century ago. The purpose of this unique Handbook is to unfold the transformation of the philosophy of mathematics from its origins in the history of mathem atical practice. In order to do so, chapters will describe different mathematical practices in different time periods of history and contrast it with the development of philosophy. The contributions will include scholars from other disciplines who have contributed to the richness of perspectives that abound the study of philosophy today. The Handbook aims to synthesize what is known, and what has unfolded but also offer directions in which the study of philosophy of mathematics as evident in increasingly diverse mathematical practices is headed. Different sections of the Handbook will offer insights into the origins, debates, methodologies and newer perspectives that characterize the discipline today. This Handbook is curated by an editorial advisory board consisting of leading scholars from the disciplines of mathematics, history and philosophy. Editorial Advisory Board Andrew Aberdein Jody Azzouni William Byers Carlo Cellucci Chandler Davis Paul Ernest Michele Friend Reuben Hersh Yuri Manin Athanase Papadopoulos Ulf Persson Kim Plofker John Stillwell David Tall.
Download or read book Beyond the Learned Academy written by Philip Beeley and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-12-06 with total page 572 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The tremendous growth of the mathematical sciences in the early modern world was reflected contemporaneously in an increasingly sophisticated level of practical mathematics in fields such as merchants' accounts, instrument making, teaching, navigation, and gauging. In many ways, mathematics shaped the knowledge culture of the age, infiltrating workshops, dockyards, and warehouses, before extending through the factories of the Industrial Revolution to the trading companies and banks of the nineteenth century. While theoretical developments in the history of mathematics have been made the topic of numerous scholarly investigations, in many cases based around the work of key figures such as Descartes, Huygens, Leibniz, or Newton, practical mathematics, especially from the seventeenth century onwards, has been largely neglected. The present volume, comprising fifteen essays by leading authorities in the history of mathematics, seeks to fill this gap by exemplifying the richness, diversity, and breadth of mathematical practice from the seventeenth century through to the middle of the nineteenth century.
Download or read book Mathematical Practitioners and the Transformation of Natural Knowledge in Early Modern Europe written by Lesley B. Cormack and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-03-15 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that we can only understand transformations of nature studies in the Scientific Revolution if we take seriously the interaction between practitioners (those who know by doing) and scholars (those who know by thinking). These are not in opposition, however. Theory and practice are end points on a continuum, with some participants interested only in the practical, others only in the theoretical, and most in the murky intellectual and material world in between. It is this borderland where influence, appropriation, and collaboration have the potential to lead to new methods, new subjects of enquiry, and new social structures of natural philosophy and science. The case for connection between theory and practice can be most persuasively drawn in the area of mathematics, which is the focus of this book. Practical mathematics was a growing field in early modern Europe and these essays are organised into three parts which contribute to the debate about the role of mathematical practice in the Scientific Revolution. First, they demonstrate the variability of the identity of practical mathematicians, and of the practices involved in their activities in early modern Europe. Second, readers are invited to consider what practical mathematics looked like and that although practical mathematical knowledge was transmitted and circulated in a wide variety of ways, participants were able to recognize them all as practical mathematics. Third, the authors show how differences and nuances in practical mathematics typically depended on the different contexts in which it was practiced: social, cultural, political, and economic particularities matter. Historians of science, especially those interested in the Scientific Revolution period and the history of mathematics will find this book and its ground-breaking approach of particular interest.
Download or read book Nominalism and Constructivism in Seventeenth Century Mathematical Philosophy written by David Sepkoski and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-24 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What was the basis for the adoption of mathematics as the primary mode of discourse for describing natural events by a large segment of the philosophical community in the seventeenth century? In answering this question, this book demonstrates that a significant group of philosophers shared the belief that there is no necessary correspondence between external reality and objects of human understanding, which they held to include the objects of mathematical and linguistic discourse. The result is a scholarly reliable, but accessible, account of the role of mathematics in the works of (amongst others) Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Newton, Leibniz, and Berkeley. This impressive volume will benefit scholars interested in the history of philosophy, mathematical philosophy and the history of mathematics.
Download or read book Philosophy of Mathematics Oxford Bibliographies Online Research Guide written by Oxford University Press and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2010-06-01 with total page 27 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This ebook is a selective guide designed to help scholars and students of social work find reliable sources of information by directing them to the best available scholarly materials in whatever form or format they appear from books, chapters, and journal articles to online archives, electronic data sets, and blogs. Written by a leading international authority on the subject, the ebook provides bibliographic information supported by direct recommendations about which sources to consult and editorial commentary to make it clear how the cited sources are interrelated related. This ebook is a static version of an article from Oxford Bibliographies Online: Philosophy, a dynamic, continuously updated, online resource designed to provide authoritative guidance through scholarship and other materials relevant to the study Philosophy. Oxford Bibliographies Online covers most subject disciplines within the social science and humanities, for more information visit www.oxfordbibligraphies.com.
Download or read book The Continuous the Discrete and the Infinitesimal in Philosophy and Mathematics written by John L. Bell and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-09-09 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores and articulates the concepts of the continuous and the infinitesimal from two points of view: the philosophical and the mathematical. The first section covers the history of these ideas in philosophy. Chapter one, entitled ‘The continuous and the discrete in Ancient Greece, the Orient and the European Middle Ages,’ reviews the work of Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, and other Ancient Greeks; the elements of early Chinese, Indian and Islamic thought; and early Europeans including Henry of Harclay, Nicholas of Autrecourt, Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, Thomas Bradwardine and Nicolas Oreme. The second chapter of the book covers European thinkers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: Galileo, Newton, Leibniz, Descartes, Arnauld, Fermat, and more. Chapter three, 'The age of continuity,’ discusses eighteenth century mathematicians including Euler and Carnot, and philosophers, among them Hume, Kant and Hegel. Examining the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the fourth chapter describes the reduction of the continuous to the discrete, citing the contributions of Bolzano, Cauchy and Reimann. Part one of the book concludes with a chapter on divergent conceptions of the continuum, with the work of nineteenth and early twentieth century philosophers and mathematicians, including Veronese, Poincaré, Brouwer, and Weyl. Part two of this book covers contemporary mathematics, discussing topology and manifolds, categories, and functors, Grothendieck topologies, sheaves, and elementary topoi. Among the theories presented in detail are non-standard analysis, constructive and intuitionist analysis, and smooth infinitesimal analysis/synthetic differential geometry. No other book so thoroughly covers the history and development of the concepts of the continuous and the infinitesimal.
Download or read book From Brouwer to Hilbert written by Paolo Mancosu and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 1998 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most contemporary work in the foundations of mathematics takes its start from the groundbreaking contributions of, among others, Hilbert, Brouwer, Bernays, and Weyl. This book offers an introduction to the debate on the foundations of mathematics during the 1920s and presents the English reader with a selection of twenty five articles central to the debate which have not been previously translated. It is an ideal text for undergraduate and graduate courses in the philosophy of mathematics.
Download or read book The Philosophy of Mathematical Practice written by Paolo Mancosu and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2008-06-19 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary philosophy of mathematics offers us an embarrassment of riches. Among the major areas of work one could list developments of the classical foundational programs, analytic approaches to epistemology and ontology of mathematics, and developments at the intersection of history and philosophy of mathematics. But anyone familiar with contemporary philosophy of mathematics will be aware of the need for new approaches that pay closer attention to mathematical practice. This book is the first attempt to give a coherent and unified presentation of this new wave of work in philosophy of mathematics. The new approach is innovative at least in two ways. First, it holds that there are important novel characteristics of contemporary mathematics that are just as worthy of philosophical attention as the distinction between constructive and non-constructive mathematics at the time of the foundational debates. Secondly, it holds that many topics which escape purely formal logical treatment - such as visualization, explanation, and understanding - can nonetheless be subjected to philosophical analysis. The Philosophy of Mathematical Practice comprises an introduction by the editor and eight chapters written by some of the leading scholars in the field. Each chapter consists of short introduction to the general topic of the chapter followed by a longer research article in the area. The eight topics selected represent a broad spectrum of contemporary philosophical reflection on different aspects of mathematical practice: diagrammatic reasoning and representation systems; visualization; mathematical explanation; purity of methods; mathematical concepts; the philosophical relevance of category theory; philosophical aspects of computer science in mathematics; the philosophical impact of recent developments in mathematical physics.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century written by Peter R. Anstey and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-06-27 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century comprises twenty-six new essays by leading experts in the field. This unique scholarly resource provides advanced students and scholars with a comprehensive overview of the issues that are informing research on the subject, while at the same time offering new directions for research to take. The volume is ambitious in scope: it covers the whole of the seventeenth century, ranging from Francis Bacon to John Locke and Isaac Newton. The Handbook contains five parts: the introductory Part I examines the state of the discipline and the nature of its practitioners as the century unfolded; Part II discusses the leading natural philosophers and the philosophy of nature, including Bacon, Boyle, and Newton; Part III covers knowledge and the human faculty of the understanding; Part IV explores the leading topics in British moral philosophy from the period; and Part V concerns political philosophy. In addition to dealing with canonical authors and celebrated texts, such as Thomas Hobbes and his Leviathan, the Handbook discusses many less well-known figures and debates from the period, whose importance is only now being appreciated.
Download or read book Lakatos and the Historical Approach to Philosophy of Mathematics written by Donald Gillies and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-12-31 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Element begins by claiming that Imre Lakatos (1922–74) in his famous paper 'Proofs and Refutations' (1963–64) was the first to introduce the historical approach to philosophy of mathematics. Section 2 gives a detailed analysis of Lakatos' ideas on the philosophy of mathematics. Lakatos died at the age of only 51, and at the time of this death had plans to continue his work on philosophy of mathematics which were never carried out. However, Lakatos' historical approach to philosophy of mathematics was taken up by other researchers in the field, and Sections 3 and 4 of the Element give an account of how they developed this approach. Then Section 5 gives an overview of what has been achieved so far by the historical approach to philosophy of mathematics and considers what its prospects for the future might be.
Download or read book New Perspectives on Mathematical Practices written by Bart Van Kerkhove and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2009 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This 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.
Download or read book Explanation and Proof in Mathematics written by Gila Hanna and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2009-12-04 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the four decades since Imre Lakatos declared mathematics a "quasi-empirical science," increasing attention has been paid to the process of proof and argumentation in the field -- a development paralleled by the rise of computer technology and the mounting interest in the logical underpinnings of mathematics. Explanantion and Proof in Mathematics assembles perspectives from mathematics education and from the philosophy and history of mathematics to strengthen mutual awareness and share recent findings and advances in their interrelated fields. With examples ranging from the geometrists of the 17th century and ancient Chinese algorithms to cognitive psychology and current educational practice, contributors explore the role of refutation in generating proofs, the varied links between experiment and deduction, the use of diagrammatic thinking in addition to pure logic, and the uses of proof in mathematics education (including a critique of "authoritative" versus "authoritarian" teaching styles). A sampling of the coverage: The conjoint origins of proof and theoretical physics in ancient Greece. Proof as bearers of mathematical knowledge. Bridging knowing and proving in mathematical reasoning. The role of mathematics in long-term cognitive development of reasoning. Proof as experiment in the work of Wittgenstein. Relationships between mathematical proof, problem-solving, and explanation. Explanation and Proof in Mathematics is certain to attract a wide range of readers, including mathematicians, mathematics education professionals, researchers, students, and philosophers and historians of mathematics.
