Tradition
Mathematicism
Overview
Mathematicism is 'the effort to employ the formal structure and rigorous method of mathematics as a model for the conduct of philosophy', or the epistemological view that reality is fundamentally mathematical. The term has been applied to a number of philosophers, including Pythagoras and René Descartes although the term was not used by themselves.
The role of mathematics in Western philosophy has grown and expanded from Pythagoras onwards. It is clear that numbers held a particular importance for the Pythagorean school, although it was the later work of Plato that attracts the label of mathematicism from modern philosophers. Furthermore it is René Descartes who provides the first mathematical epistemology which he describes as a mathesis universalis, and which is also referred to as mathematicism.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
Any such select set is called the set of postulates, or premises, from which the reasoning proceeds. The reasoning is nothing else than the exhibition of the whole pattern of general conditions involved in the pattern derived from the selected postulates.
Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the modern world
States what Mathematicism is; the author is tied to Mathematicism in the knowledge graph.
The notion of continuity depends upon that of _order_, since continuity is merely a particular type of order. Mathematics has, in modern times, brought order into greater and greater prominence. In former days, it was supposed (and philosophers are still apt to suppose) that quantity was the fundamental notion of mathematics.
Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays
States what Mathematicism is; the author is tied to Mathematicism in the knowledge graph.
Meanwhile every mathematical proposition remains always a universal truth, which is valid for innumerable particular cases; and a graduated process from the simple to the complicated propositions which are to be deduced from them, is also essential to mathematics; therefore, in every respect mathematics is a science. The completeness of a science as such, that is, in respect of form, consists in there being as much…
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea
States what Mathematicism is.
Philosophers who discussed Mathematicism
Related ideas
- Étienne Gilson
- Cartesianism
- Idealism
- Foundations of mathematics
- Max Tegmark
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
- Algebra
- Metaphysics
- Monism
- Mathematical logic
- Western culture
- German idealism
- Platonism
- Pythagoras
- Primitive notion
- Rule of inference
- René Descartes
- Metaphysics (Aristotle)
- Set theory
- Pythagoreanism
- Truth
- Arithmetic
- John Cottingham
- Wave
Place in the tradition
Part of Anti-realism.