Wow! eBook
Mathematical Thought and Its Objects
Author(s): Charles Parsons (Author)
- Publisher: Cambridge University Press
- Publication Date: 6 Nov. 2009
- Edition: 1st
- Language: English
- Print length: 400 pages
- ISBN-10: 0521119111
- ISBN-13: 9780521119115
Book Description
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.
