Dialectic and diagonalization
Inquiry 34 (1):3 – 25 (1991)
| Abstract | This essay is about mathematics as a written or literate language. Through historical and anthropological observations drawn from the history of Greek mathematics and the oral tradition preceding the rise of literacy in Greece, as well as considerations on the nature of alphabetic writing, it is argued that three essential linguistic features of mathematical discourse are jointly possible only through written, alphabetic language. The essay concludes with a discussion of how both alphabetic principles and issues related to literacy faced by the Greeks in the axiomatization of geometry play a central role in some specific metamathematical theories. Drawing extensively on the work of ArpSd Szatx5, Eric Havelock, and Albert Lord, the implications developed between Szab6's history of Greek mathematics and Havelock and Lord's theories of writing and oral traditions (Homer's in particular) are the author's own, as are the applications to modern logic | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,653 |
| External links |
 |
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesT. Koetsier (1991). Lakatos' Philosophy of Mathematics: A Historical Approach. Distributors for the U.S. And Canada, Elsevier Science Pub. Co..
Stephan Körner (1968/1986). The Philosophy of Mathematics: An Introductory Essay. Dover Publications.
Ladislav Kvasz (2000). Changes of Language in the Development of Mathematics. Philosophia Mathematica 8 (1):47-83.
J. C. Nyìri (1999). Philosophy, Education, and the History of Communication Technologies. The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy 3:185-192.
Anne Zavalkoff (2004). Dis/Located in Nature? A Feminist Critique of David Abram. Ethics and the Environment 9 (1):121-139.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2009-01-30Total downloads3 ( #201,730 of 548,984 )Recent downloads (6 months)0How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
