Abstract
Aristotelians deplore the narrow range of examples chosen for discussion in traditional philosophy of mathematics. The traditional diet – numbers, sets, infinite cardinals, axioms, theorems of formal logic – is far from typical of what mathematicians do. It has led to intellectual anorexia, by depriving the philosophy of mathematics of the nourishment it could and should receive from the expansive world of mathematics of the last hundred years. Philosophers have almost completely ignored not only the broad range of pure and applied mathematics and statistics, but a whole suite of ‘formal’ or ‘mathematical’ sciences that have appeared only in the last eighty years. I give here a few brief examples to indicate why these developments are of philosophical interest to those pursuing realist views of mathematics. Of special significance is that they contain many examples of necessities about the real world.
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© 2014 James Franklin
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Franklin, J. (2014). The Formal Sciences Discover the Philosophers’ Stone. In: An Aristotelian Realist Philosophy of Mathematics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137400734_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137400734_7
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