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Philosophia Mathematica Advance Access published online on September 13, 2007
Philosophia Mathematica, doi:10.1093/philmat/nkm030
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Copyright © The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference.

Book Review

MATTHIAS WILLE. Mathematics and the Synthetic A Priori: Epistemological Investigations into the Status of Mathematical Axioms

Claus Beisbart*

* Institute for Philosophy, Dortmund University, D-44221 Dortmund, Germany

Correspondence: Claus.Beisbart@udo.edu

Matthias Wille. Mathematics and the Synthetic A Priori: Epistemological Investigations into the Status of Mathematical Axioms. Paderborn: Mentis, 2007. ISBN 978-3-89785-585-4 (paper). Pp. 234

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

Kant famously thought that mathematics contains synthetic a priori truths. In his book, Wille defends a version of the Kantian thesis on not-so-Kantian grounds. Wille calls his account neo-Kantian (p. 19), because it makes sense of Kantian tenets by using a methodology that takes the linguistic and pragmatic turns seriously (pp. 19, 51–55).

Wille's work forms part of a larger project in which the statuses of mathematics and proof theory are investigated (pp. 11 f.). The official purpose of the present book is to answer the question: what is mathematics (pp. 11, 24). Wille sets himself the task of finding a definition that enables him to distinguish between mathematics and proof theory (pp. 30–32, although he admits that . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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