Skip Navigation


Philosophia Mathematica Advance Access originally published online on October 31, 2008
Philosophia Mathematica 2009 17(1):95-108; doi:10.1093/philmat/nkn033
This Article
Right arrow Full Text
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow All Versions of this Article:
17/1/95    most recent
nkn033v1
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Avigad, J.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

© The Author [2008]. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Book Review

MARCUS GIAQUINTO. Visual Thinking in Mathematics: An Epistemological Study

Jeremy Avigad*

* Department of Philosophy, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213-3890, U.S.A. avigad@cmu.edu.

MARCUS GIAQUINTO. Visual Thinking in Mathematics: An Epistemological Study. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-928594-5,Pp. vii + 287.{dagger}

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

Published in 1891, Edmund Husserl's first book, Philosophie der Arithmetik, aimed to ‘prepare the scientific foundations for a future construction of that discipline’. His goals should seem reasonable to contemporary philosophers of mathematics:

...through patient investigation of details, to seek foundations, and to test noteworthy theories through painstaking criticism, separating the correct from the erroneous, in order, thus informed, to set in their place new ones which are, if possible, more adequately secured. (Husserl 1891, p. 5) 1

But the ensuing strategy for grounding mathematical knowledge sounds strange to the modern ear. For Husserl cast his work as a sequence of ‘psychological and logical investigations’, providing a psychological analysis

...of the concepts multiplicity, unity, and number, insofar as they are given to use authentically and not through indirect symbolizations. (ibid., pp. 6–7)

This emphasis on psychology is a reflection of Husserl's training. As a teenager . . . [Full Text of this Article]


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?