Abstract
Are mathematical objects affected by their
historicity? Do they simply lose their identity
and their validity in the course of history? If
not, how can they always be accessible in their
ideality regardless of their transmission in the
course of time? Husserl and Foucault have
raised this question and offered accounts, both
of which, albeit different in their originality,
are equally provocative. Both acknowledge
that a scientific object like a geometrical theorem
or a chemical equation has a history because
it is only constituted in and transmitted
through history. But they see that history as a
part of its ideality, so that, although historical,
a scientific object retains its identity as one and
the same object.