Dr Edward Kanterian from the Department of Philosophy gave a keynote speech entitled ‘The Idea of a Mathematical Philosophy: From Descartes to Frege, via Kant’, followed by a workshop on Kant’s philosophy of mathematics at a two-day colloquium at the University of Darmstadt on 25 and 26 May 2016.
Mathematics has always been a source of inspiration for philosophy, and during the modern period, starting with Descartes, the mathematisation of philosophy has become a significant paradigm. Leibniz aimed to build a formal logic and language by means of which philosophical disagreements could be simply resolved by calculation. Frege and Russell mathematised logic, partly in the hope to help solve the problems of philosophy. Today, ‘mathematical philosophy’ has become a major approach or school, promising to finally realise the ideal of philosophy as a scientific discipline. In this talk Edward voiced serious doubts about this development, focusing on the conceptual-historical roots of the mathematical paradigm in philosophy. To this end he offered a critical discussion of paradigmatic examples of mathematical reasoning in Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Frege and contemporary formal semantics.
Full details of the event are available at:
www.philosophie.tu-darmstadt.de/institut/aktuelles/aktuell.en.jsp