Overview

In these essays Geoffrey Hellman presents a strong case for a healthy pluralism in mathematics and its logics, supporting peaceful coexistence despite what appear to be contradictions between different systems, and positing different frameworks serving different legitimate purposes. The essays refine and extend Hellman's modal-structuralist account of mathematics, developing a height-potentialist view of higher set theory which recognizes indefinite extendability of models and stages at which sets occur. In the first of three new essays written for this volume, Hellman shows how extendability can be deployed to derive the axiom of Infinity and that of Replacement, improving on earlier accounts; he also shows how extendability leads to attractive, novel resolutions of the set-theoretic paradoxes. Other essays explore advantages and limitations of restrictive systems - nominalist, predicativist, and constructivist. Also included are two essays, with Solomon Feferman, on predicative foundations of arithmetic.

Full Product Details

Author:   Geoffrey Hellman (University of Minnesota)
Publisher:   Cambridge University Press
Imprint:   Cambridge University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 1.60cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.431kg
ISBN:  

9781108714006

ISBN 10:   1108714005
Pages:   294
Publication Date:   10 November 2022
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.

Table of Contents

Introduction; Part I. Structuralism, Extendability, and Nominalism: 1. Structuralism without Structures?; 2. What Is Categorical Structuralism?; 3. On the Significance of the Burali-Forti Paradox; 4. Extending the Iterative Conception of Set: A Height-Potentialist Perspective; 5. On Nominalism; 6. Maoist Mathematics? Critical Study of John Burgess and Gideon Rosen, A Subject with No Object: Strategies for Nominalistic Interpretation of Mathematics (Oxford, 1997); Part II. Predicative Mathematics and Beyond: 7. Predicative Foundations of Arithmetic (with Solomon Feferman); 8. Challenges to Predicative Foundations of Arithmetic (with Solomon Feferman); 9. Predicativism as a Philosophical Position; 10. On the Goedel-Friedman Program; Part III. Logics of Mathematics: 11. Logical Truth by Linguistic Convention; 12. Never Say 'Never'! On the Communication Problem between Intuitionism and Classicism; 13. Constructive Mathematics and Quantum Mechanics: Unbounded Operators and the Spectral Theorem; 14. If 'If-Then' Then What?; 15. Mathematical Pluralism: The Case of Smooth Infinitesimal Analysis.

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Author Information

Geoffrey Hellman is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. His publications include Mathematics without Numbers: Towards a Modal-Structural Interpretation (1989), Varieties of Continua: From Regions to Points and Back (with Stewart Shapiro, 2018), and Mathematical Structuralism, Cambridge Elements in Philosophy of Mathematics (with Stewart Shapiro, Cambridge, 2018).

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