Wilfred Sieg and Dirk Schlimm. Dedekind's Analysis of Number: Systems and Axioms.

Mathematicians tend to think of themselves as scientists investigating the features of real mathematical things, and the wildly successful application of mathematics in the physical sciences reinforces this picture of mathematics as an objective study. For philosophers, however, this realism about mathematics raises serious questions: What are mathematical things? Where are they? How do we know about them? Offering a scrupulously fair treatment of both mathematical and philosophical concerns, Penelope Maddy here delineates and defends a novel version of mathematical realism. (...) She answers the traditional questions and poses a challenging new one, refocusing philosophical attention on the pressing foundational issues of contemporary mathematics. (shrink)

There can be no doubt about the value of Frege's contributions to the philosophy of mathematics. First, he invented quantification theory and this was the first step toward making precise the notion of a purely logical deduction. Secondly, he was the first to publish a logical analysis of the ancestral R* of a relation R, which yields a definition of R* in second-order logic.1 Only a narrow and arid conception of philosophy would exclude these two achievements. Thirdly and very importantly, (...) the discussion in §§58-60 of the G r u n d l a g e n defends a conception of mathematical existence, to be found in Cantor (1883) and later in the writings of Dedekind and Hilbert, by basing it upon considerations about meaning which have general application, outside mathematics.2.. (shrink)

Various contributors to recent philosophy of mathematics havetaken Richard Dedekind to be the founder of structuralismin mathematics. In this paper I examine whether Dedekind did, in fact, hold structuralist views and, insofar as that is the case, how they relate to the main contemporary variants. In addition, I argue that his writings contain philosophical insights that are worth reexamining and reviving. The discussion focusses on Dedekind''s classic essay Was sind und was sollen die Zahlen?, supplemented by evidence from Stetigkeit und (...) irrationale Zahlen, his scientific correspondence, and his Nachlaß. (shrink)