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Philosophia Mathematica Advance Access published online on November 5, 2009
Philosophia Mathematica, doi:10.1093/philmat/nkp016
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© The Author [2009]. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Book Review

DAVID BOSTOCK. Philosophy of Mathematics: An Introduction

James Robert Brown*

* Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M5R 2M8, Canada. jrbrown@chass.utoronto.ca

DAVID BOSTOCK. Philosophy of Mathematics: An Introduction Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. ISBN 978-1-4051-8992-7 (hbk); 978-1-4051-8991-0 (pbk). Pp. x + 332

The first 10% of the full text of this article appears below.

As its subtitle indicates, David Bostock’s Philosophy of Mathematics is an introductory work. It is significantly different from other recent books in being highly historical. There are extended discussions of Plato, Aristotle, the medievals, Kant, Mill, and so on. If, like me, you consider logicism, formalism, and intuitionism—whose heyday was a century ago—to be largely historical topics, then Bostock’s book is a very historical work indeed. This is its strength; it is also its weakness, though I do not mean this to be a criticism. Inevitably, by keeping the book within a reasonable limit of 300-odd pages, Bostock has given rather little time to current topics. That may trouble some, but I will . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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