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| 12 | Gödel’s unpublished papers on foundations of mathematics | 276 |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.