First published in 1903, _Principles of Mathematics_ was Bertrand Russell’s first major work in print. It was this title which saw him begin his ascent towards eminence. In this groundbreaking and important work, Bertrand Russell argues that mathematics and logic are, in fact, identical and what is commonly called mathematics is simply later deductions from logical premises. Highly influential and engaging, this important work led to Russell’s dominance of analytical logic on western philosophy in the twentieth century.

Charles Parsons examines the notion of object, with the aim to navigate between nominalism, denying that distinctively mathematical objects exist, and forms of Platonism that postulate a transcendent realm of such objects. He introduces the central mathematical notion of structure and defends a version of the structuralist view of mathematical objects, according to which their existence is relative to a structure and they have no more of a 'nature' than that confers on them. Parsons also analyzes the concept of intuition (...) and presents a conception of it distantly inspired by that of Kant, which describes a basic kind of access to abstract objects and an element of a first conception of the infinite. (shrink)

From Brouwer To Hilbert: The Debate on the Foundations of Mathematics in the 1920s offers the first comprehensive introduction to the most exciting period in the foundation of mathematics in the twentieth century. The 1920s witnessed the seminal foundational work of Hilbert and Bernays in proof theory, Brouwer's refinement of intuitionistic mathematics, and Weyl's predicativist approach to the foundations of analysis. This impressive collection makes available the first English translations of twenty-five central articles by these important contributors and many others. (...) The articles have been translated for the first time from Dutch, French, and German, and the volume is divided into four sections devoted to (1) Brouwer, (2) Weyl, (3) Bernays and Hilbert, and (4) the emergence of intuitionistic logic. Each section opens with an introduction which provides the necessary historical and technical context for understanding the articles. Although most contemporary work in this field takes its start from the groundbreaking contributions of these major figures, a good, scholarly introduction to the area was not available until now. Unique and accessible, From Brouwer To Hilbert will serve as an ideal text for undergraduate and graduate courses in the philosophy of mathematics, and will also be an invaluable resource for philosophers, mathematicians, and interested non-specialists. (shrink)

This paper is divided into two parts. Part I provides a resumé of the evolution of the notion of predicativity. Part II describes our own work on the subject.Part I§1. Conceptions of sets.Statements about sets lie at the heart of most modern attempts to systematize all (or, at least, all known) mathematics. Technical and philosophical discussions concerning such systematizations and the underlying conceptions have thus occupied a considerable portion of the literature on the foundations of mathematics.

In this collection of essays written over a period of twenty years, Solomon Feferman explains advanced results in modern logic and employs them to cast light on significant problems in the foundations of mathematics. Most troubling among these is the revolutionary way in which Georg Cantor elaborated the nature of the infinite, and in doing so helped transform the face of twentieth-century mathematics. Feferman details the development of Cantorian concepts and the foundational difficulties they engendered. He argues that the freedom (...) provided by Cantorian set theory was purchased at a heavy philosophical price, namely adherence to a form of mathematical platonism that is difficult to support. -/- Beginning with a previously unpublished lecture for a general audience, Deciding the Undecidable, Feferman examines the famous list of twenty-three mathematical problems posed by David Hilbert, concentrating on three problems that have most to do with logic. Other chapters are devoted to the work and thought of Kurt Gödel, whose stunning results in the 1930s on the incompleteness of formal systems and the consistency of Cantors continuum hypothesis have been of utmost importance to all subsequent work in logic. Though Gödel has been identified as the leading defender of set-theoretical platonism, surprisingly even he at one point regarded it as unacceptable. -/- In his concluding chapters, Feferman uses tools from the special part of logic called proof theory to explain how the vast part--if not all--of scientifically applicable mathematics can be justified on the basis of purely arithmetical principles. At least to that extent, the question raised in two of the essays of the volume, Is Cantor Necessary?, is answered with a resounding no. -/- This volume of important and influential work by one of the leading figures in logic and the foundations of mathematics is essential reading for anyone interested in these subjects. (shrink)

This paper considers two reasons that might support Russell’s choice of a ramified-type theory over a simple-type theory. The first reason is the existence of purported paradoxes that can be formulated in any simple-type language, including an argument that Russell considered in 1903. These arguments depend on certain converse-compositional principles. When we take account of Russell’s doctrine that a propositional function is not a constituent of its values, these principles turn out to be too implausible to make these arguments troubling. (...) The second reason is conditional on a substitutional interpretation of quantification over types other than that of individuals. This reason stands up to investigation: a simple-type language will not sustain such an interpretation, but a ramified-type language will. And there is evidence that Russell was tacitly inclined towards such an interpretation. A strong construal of that interpretation opens a way to make sense of Russell’s simultaneous repudiation of propositions and his willingness to quantify over them. But that way runs into trouble with Russell’s commitment to the finitude of human understanding. (shrink)

This book develops arithmetic without the induction principle, working in theories that are interpretable in Raphael Robinson's theory Q. Certain inductive formulas, the bounded ones, are interpretable in Q. A mathematically strong, but logically very weak, predicative arithmetic is constructed. Originally published in 1986. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting (...) them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

While it is relatively clear what the subject matter of empirical sciences is, puzzles persist about the proper subject matter of mathematics. The logicists took mathematics to be concerned solely with deductive arguments. Their programme attempted to combine three incompatible claims: that mathematics is a body of truths, that it is non‐empirical, and that it employs proofs obeying the rules of classical logic. By giving up the third contention, it becomes possible to salvage the logicist programme and to explain better (...) mathematical practice, including the fact of its application in empirical disciplines. (shrink)

Key words: the continuum, structuralism, conceptual structuralism, basic structural conceptions, Euclidean geometry, Hilbertian geometry, the real number system, settheoretical conceptions, phenomenological conceptions, foundational conceptions, physical conceptions.

The unfolding of schematic formal systems is a novel concept which was initiated in Feferman , Gödel ’96, Lecture Notes in Logic, Springer, Berlin, 1996, pp. 3–22). This paper is mainly concerned with the proof-theoretic analysis of various unfolding systems for non-finitist arithmetic . In particular, we examine two restricted unfoldings and , as well as a full unfolding, . The principal results then state: is equivalent to ; is equivalent to ; is equivalent to . Thus is proof-theoretically equivalent (...) to predicative analysis. (shrink)

Set theory deals with the most fundamental existence questions in mathematics—questions which affect other areas of mathematics, from the real numbers to structures of all kinds, but which are posed as dealing with the existence of sets. Especially noteworthy are principles establishing the existence of some infinite sets, the so-called “arbitrary sets.” This paper is devoted to an analysis of the motivating goal of studying arbitrary sets, usually referred to under the labels of quasi-combinatorialism or combinatorial maximality. After explaining what (...) is meant by definability and by “arbitrariness,” a first historical part discusses the strong motives why set theory was conceived as a theory of arbitrary sets, emphasizing connections with analysis and particularly with the continuum of real numbers. Judged from this perspective, the axiom of choice stands out as a most central and natural set-theoretic principle (in the sense of quasi-combinatorialism). A second part starts by considering the potential mismatch between the formal systems of mathematics and their motivating conceptions, and proceeds to offer an elementary discussion of how far the Zermelo—Fraenkel system goes in laying out principles that capture the idea of “arbitrary sets”. We argue that the theory is rather poor in this respect. (shrink)

The concept of the (full) unfolding of a schematic system is used to answer the following question: Which operations and predicates, and which principles concerning them, ought to be accepted if one has accepted ? The program to determine for various systems of foundational significance was previously carried out for a system of nonfinitist arithmetic, ; it was shown that is proof-theoretically equivalent to predicative analysis. In the present paper we work out the unfolding notions for a basic schematic system (...) of finitist arithmetic, , and for an extension of that by a form of the so-called Bar Rule. It is shown that and are proof-theoretically equivalent, respectively, to Primitive Recursive Arithmetic, , and to Peano Arithmetic,. (shrink)

How do ordinals measure the strength and computational power of formal theories? This paper is concerned with the connection between ordinal representation systems and theories established in ordinal analyses. It focusses on results which explain the nature of this connection in terms of semantical and computational notions from model theory, set theory, and generalized recursion theory.