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  1. Measuring the Size of Infinite Collections of Natural Numbers: Was Cantor’s Theory of Infinite Number Inevitable?Paolo Mancosu - 2009 - Review of Symbolic Logic 2 (4):612-646.
    Cantor’s theory of cardinal numbers offers a way to generalize arithmetic from finite sets to infinite sets using the notion of one-to-one association between two sets. As is well known, all countable infinite sets have the same ‘size’ in this account, namely that of the cardinality of the natural numbers. However, throughout the history of reflections on infinity another powerful intuition has played a major role: if a collectionAis properly included in a collectionBthen the ‘size’ ofAshould be less than the (...)
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  • An Aristotelian notion of size.Vieri Benci, Mauro Di Nasso & Marco Forti - 2006 - Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 143 (1-3):43-53.
    The naïve idea of “size” for collections seems to obey both Aristotle’s Principle: “the whole is greater than its parts” and Cantor’s Principle: “1-to-1 correspondences preserve size”. Notoriously, Aristotle’s and Cantor’s principles are incompatible for infinite collections. Cantor’s theory of cardinalities weakens the former principle to “the part is not greater than the whole”, but the outcoming cardinal arithmetic is very unusual. It does not allow for inverse operations, and so there is no direct way of introducing infinitesimal numbers. Here (...)
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