Reuben Hersh Opens a Path Beyond Mathematical Mysticisms.

Reuben Hersh Opens a Path Beyond Mathematical Mysticisms.

Dear Reader,

The Special Council for the Encyclopedia recently discovered another interesting internet book discussion, reachable via the following URL --

 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/750042.What_Is_Mathematics_Really_ .

 

The following is an excerpt from that book discussion --

“Most philosophers of mathematics treat it as isolated, timeless, ahistorical, inhuman.  Reuben Hersh argues the contrary, that mathematics must be understood as a human activity, a social phenomenon, part of human culture, historically evolved, and intelligible only in a social context.  Hersh pulls the screen back to reveal mathematics as seen by professionals, debunking many mathematical myths, and demonstrating how the "humanist" idea of the nature of mathematics more closely resembles how mathematicians actually work.  At the heart of his book is a fascinating historical account of the mainstream of philosophy -- ranging from Pythagoras, Descartes, and Spinoza, to Bertrand Russell, David Hilbert, and Rudolph Carnap -- followed by the mavericks who saw mathematics as a human artifact, including Aristotle, Locke, Hume, Mill, and Lakatos.  What is Mathematics, Really? reflects an insider's view of mathematical life, and will be hotly debated by anyone with an interest in mathematics or the philosophy of science.”

I posted the following contribution to this book discussion --

“The book "What Is Mathematics, Really?" lays out a view that mathematics, is not an aggregate of rare human "seeings" into a absolutely perfect Platonic realm of immutable, eternal, infinite 'eide', registering, in advance, and always already, all possible mathematical concepts and truths, but on the contrary, is a human, collective, cultural product, and not, either, that it is some monolithic Darwinian manifestation of "the human Genome", but that it is a 'meta-Darwinian' component of 'the human Phenome'. 

One of the developments to which this understanding of what mathematics is, leads, is an immanent critique of modern mathematics as an ideology-infected science, in the Marxian sense of "ideology".  Such a critique leads to a new mathematics, including to the 'dialectical ideography', or "mathematics of dialectics", developed by Foundation Encyclopedia Dialectica [F.E.D.].  Their work is available for free-of-charge download via www.dialectics.info .” 

Regards,

Miguel