International Congress of Arts and Science, Volume 1: Philosophy and Metaphysics
Philosophy
International Congress of Arts and Science, Volume 1: Philosophy and Metaphysics
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all the wishes which were expressed by specialists, the number would
have been quickly doubled.
Yet a few remarks may be devoted to the branching off within the seven
divisions, as a short discussion of some of these details may throw
additional light on the general principles of the whole plan. If we thus
begin with the Normative Sciences, we stand at once before one feature
of the plan which has been in an especially high degree a matter of both
approval and criticism: the fact that Mathematics is grouped with
Philosophy. The Division was to contain, as we have seen, the systems of
logically connected will-acts of the over-individual subject. That
Ethics or Logic or Æsthetics or Philosophy of Religion deals with such
over-individual attitudes cannot be doubted; but have we a right to
coördinate the mathematical sciences with these philosophical sciences?
Has Mathematics not a more natural place among the physical sciences
coördinated with and introductory to Mechanics, Physics, and Astronomy?
The mathematicians themselves would often be inclined to accept without
hesitation this neighborhood of the physical sciences. They would say
that the mathematical objects are independent realities whose properties
we study like those of nature, whose relations we "observe," whose
existence we "discover," and in which we are interested because they
belong to the real world. All this is true, and yet the objects of the
mathematician are objects made by the logical will only, and thus
different from all phenomena into which sensation enters. The
mathematician, of course, does not reflect on the purely logical origin
of the objects which he studies, but the system of knowledge must give
to the study of the mathematical objects its place in the group where
the functions and products of the over-individual attitudes are
classified. The mathematical object is a free creation, and a creation
not only as to the combination of elements--that would be the case with
many laboratory substances of the chemist too--but a creation as to the
elements themselves, and the value of that creation, its "mathematical
interest," is to be judged by ideals of thought; that is, by logical
purposes. No doubt this logical purpose is its application in the world
of objects and the mathematical concepts must thus fit the objective
world so absolutely that mathematics can be conceived as a description
of the world after abstracting not only from the will-relations, as
physics does, but also from the content. Mathematics would, then, be the
phenomenalistic science of the form and order of the world. In this way,
mathematics has indeed a claim to places in both divisions: among the
physical sciences if we emphasize its applicability to the world, and
among the teleological sciences if we emphasize the free creation of the
objects by the logical will. But if we really go back to epistemological
principles, our system has to prefer the latter emphasis; that is, we
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