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Philosophia Mathematica Advance Access originally published online on July 17, 2008
Philosophia Mathematica 2008 16(3):402-409; doi:10.1093/philmat/nkn017
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©The Author [2008]. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Book Review

CHARLES PARSONS. Mathematical Thought and Its Objects

John P. Burgess*

* Department of Philosophy, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544-1006, U.S.A. jburgess@princeton.edu

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. xx + 280. ISBN 978-0-521-45279-3.

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

This long-awaited volume is a must-read for anyone with a serious interest in philosophy of mathematics. The book falls into two parts, with the primary focus of the first on ontology and structuralism, and the second on intuition and epistemology, though with many links between them. The style throughout involves unhurried examination from several points of view of each issue addressed, before reaching a guarded conclusion. A wealth of material is set before the reader along the way, but a reviewer wishing to summarize the author's views crisply will be frustrated. The chapter-by-chapter survey below conveys at best a very incomplete and imperfect impression of the work's virtues, and even of its contents, falling short even of supplying a full menu for the banquet of food for thought that Parsons serves up to his readers.


   Ontology and Structuralism
 
Chapter 1 is devoted to general background about ontology. It offers a minimalist, logico-grammatical conception . . . [Full Text of this Article]


   Intuition and Epistemology
 

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