Uncountable
Subtitle: A Philosophical History of Number and Humanity from Antiquity to the Present
Contributors: Nirenberg, Ricardo L.
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2021
Place of publication: Chicago
Language: eng
Format: [electronic resource] :
Number of pages: 429
ISBN-13: 9780226647036
Subjects: Mathematics; History; Social aspects; Moral and ethical aspects; HISTORY / General
Description: "From the time of Pythagoras, we have been tempted to treat numbers as the ultimate or only truth. This book tells the history of that habit of thought. But more, it argues that the logic of counting sacrifices much of what makes us human, and that we have a responsibility to match the objects of our attention to the forms of knowledge that do them justice. Humans have extended the insights and methods of number and mathematics to more and more aspects of the world, even to their gods and their religions.Today those powers are greater than ever, as computation is applied to virtually every aspect of human activity.But the rules of mathematics do not strictly apply to many things-from elementary particles to people-in the world.By subjecting such things to the laws of logic and mathematics, we gain some kinds of knowledge, but we also lose others. How do our choices about what parts of the world to subject to the logics of mathematics affect how we live and how we die?This question is rarely asked, but it is urgent, because the sciences built upon those laws now govern so much of our knowledge, from physics to psychology.Number and Knowledge sets out to ask it. In chapters proceeding chronologically from Ancient Greek philosophy and the rise of monotheistic religions to the emergence of modern physics and economics, the book traces how ideals, practices, and habits of thought formed over millennia have turned number into the foundation-stone of human claims to knowledge and certainty.But the book is also a philosophical and poetic exhortation to take responsibility for that history, for the knowledge it has produced, and for the many aspects of the world and of humanity that it ignores or endangers.To understand what can be counted and what can't is to embrace the ethics of purposeful knowing"--
Notes: Description based upon print version of record.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: Playing with Pebbles; title: World War Crisis; title: The Greeks: A Protohistory of Theory; title: Plato, Aristotle, and the Future of Western Thought; title: Monotheism's Math Problem; title: From Descartes to Kant: An Outrageously Succinct History of Philosophy; title: What Numbers Need: Or, When Does 2 + 2 = 4?; title: Physics (and Poetry): Willing Sameness and Difference; title: Axioms of Desire: Economics and the Social Sciences; title: Killing Time; title: Ethical Conclusions.