Logic and Philosophy of Mathematics in the Early Husserl

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xxi

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2. Philosophy of Arithmetic

   • Stefania Centrone

   Pages 1-98

3. The Idea of Pure Logic

   • Stefania Centrone

   Pages 99-147

4. The Imaginary in Mathematics

   • Stefania Centrone

   Pages 149-213

5. Back Matter

   Pages 215-232

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Logic and Philosophy of Mathematics in the Early Husserl focuses on the first ten years of Edmund Husserl’s work, from the publication of his Philosophy of Arithmetic (1891) to that of his Logical Investigations (1900/01), and aims to precisely locate his early work in the fields of logic, philosophy of logic and philosophy of mathematics. Unlike most phenomenologists, the author refrains from reading Husserl’s early work as a more or less immature sketch of claims consolidated only in his later phenomenology, and unlike the majority of historians of logic she emphasizes the systematic strength and the originality of Husserl’s logico-mathematical work.

The book attempts to reconstruct the discussion between Husserl and those philosophers and mathematicians who contributed to new developments in logic, such as Leibniz, Bolzano, the logical algebraists (especially Boole and Schröder), Frege, and Hilbert and his school. It presents both a comprehensive critical examination of some of the major works produced by Husserl and his antagonists in the last decade of the 19th century and a formal reconstruction of many texts from Husserl’s Nachlaß that have not yet been the object of systematical scrutiny.

This volume will be of particular interest to researchers working in the history, and in the philosophy, of logic and mathematics, and more generally, to analytical philosophers and phenomenologists with a background in standard logic.

• Bolzano
• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
• Husserl
• Manifolds
• logic
• mathematics
• philosophy of logic
• philosophy of mathematics

From the reviews:

“Edmund Husserl is generally known as the philosopher who introduced the phenomenological method in philosophy. … He developed a philosophy of arithmetic in which he discussed the concepts of number and set. It contains valuable insights and he has, for example, what is essentially the notion of a partially recursive function. … her book is a welcome contribution to our further understanding of a very exciting period in the history of the foundations of mathematics.”­­­ (Teun Koetsier, Zentralblatt MATH, Vol. 1196, 2010)

• Philosophisches Seminar, Universität Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

  Stefania Centrone

Stefania Centrone obtained her master degree in Philosophy at the University of Florence. She was a PhD student at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, where she defended her doctoral dissertation in 2004. She was then awarded post-doctoral research grants at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa until 2008. Since January 2009, Stefania Centrone has a two-year Alexander-von-Humboldt fellowship for research on Logical Objectivism, Inference and Foundational Proof in Bernard Bolzano’s ‘Wissenschaftslehre’ at the Philosophy Department of the University of Hamburg. She has given contributed talks at various workshops and conferences all over Europe, as well as invited talks at the Universities of Dublin, Koeln and Genève.

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