The Provenance of Pure Reason
Subtitle: Essays in the Philosophy of Mathematics and Its History (Logic and Computation in Philosophy)
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: January 12, 2005
Language: eng
Number of pages: 352
ISBN-13: 9780195141924
First sentence: The crux to understanding Hilbert's conception of finitist mathematics (Hilbert, 1925, 1927) and (Hilbert and Bernays, 1934) is this question: In what sense can we prove general propositions, such as xy(x + y = y + x) about the natural numbers, without assuming the infinitude of numbers or some other infinite totality?
Description: "William Tait is one of the most distinguished philosophers of mathematics of the last fifty years. This volume collects his most important published philosophical papers from the 1980's to the present. The articles cover a wide range of issues in the foundations and philosophy of mathematics, including some on historical figures ranging from Plato to Godel." "Tait's main contributions were initially in proof theory and constructive mathematics, later moving on to more philosophical subjects including finitism and skepticism about mathematics. This collection, presented as a whole, reveals the underlying unity of Tait's work."--Jacket.