Towards a New Epistemology of Mathematics

There’s a very interesting issue of Erkenntnis just out. It’s the proceedings of PhiPMSAP 1. PhiMSAP is the Network on Philosophy of Mathematics: Sociological Aspects and Mathematical Practice of the DFG, run mostly by Benedikt Löwe and Thomas Müller, the third workshop of which I just had the pleasure of attending. Contents of the issue:

Experimental Mathematics by Alan Baker
Visualizations in Mathematics Kajsa Bråting and Johanna Pejlare
A Mathematician Reflects on the Useful and Reliable Illusion of Reality in Mathematics by Keith Devlin
The Role of Axioms in Mathematics by Kenny Easwaran
What can the Philosophy of Mathematics Learn from the History of Mathematics? by Brendan Larvor
On Abstraction and the Importance of Asking the Right Research Questions: Could Jordan have Proved the Jordan-Hölder Theorem? by Dirk Schlimm
Pi on Earth, or Mathematics in the Real World by Bart Van Kerkhove and Jean Paul Van Bendegem

One thought on “Towards a New Epistemology of Mathematics

  1. This looks like good stuff. Particularly because I just read Penelope Maddy’s “Realism in Mathematics” and it was her epistemological account that seemed like the weakest point… everything seemed to be spun out from a mere two paragraphs from Donald Hebb written 50 years ago.But… speaking as someone who knows more epistemology than phil. of math… I’d be curious to see a naturalized epistemology of math. To that end, somebody in psych or neuroscience must be working on this sort of thing… mathematical knowledge, mathematical perception… do you know of anything? I’m looking for more stuff to read.(and yes I know Maddy has changed her mind since “Realism…”)I enjoy your blog. Cheers!

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