Bill Tait: The Provenance of Pure Reason

I’ve been waiting for it for a while, and it has finally arrived: my copy of William Tait’s collection of “essays in the philosophy of mathematics and its history,” The Provenance of Pure Reason. Neither OUP nor Amazon has a table of contents for it up, so here it is:

Introduction 3
1 Finitism 21
2 Remarks on finitism 43
1 Appendix to Chapters 1 and 2 54
3 Truth and proof : the Platonism of mathematics 61
4 Beyond the axioms : the question of objectivity in mathematics 89
5 The law of excluded middle and the axiom of choice 105
6 Constructing cardinals from below 133
7 Plato’s second-best method 155
8 Noesis : Plato on exact science 178
9 Wittgenstein and the “skeptical paradoxes” 198
10 Frege versus Cantor and Dedekind : on the concept of number 212
11 Cantor’s Grundlagen and the paradoxes of set theory 252
12 Gödel’s unpublished papers on foundations of mathematics 276

I’m looking forward to reading the appendix to Chapters 1 and 2, which is where Bill takes my dissertation apart.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *