International Congress of Arts and Science, Volume 1: Philosophy and Metaphysics
Philosophy
International Congress of Arts and Science, Volume 1: Philosophy and Metaphysics
Conference proceedings; Medicine -- Congresses; Science and the humanities -- Congresses; Technology -- Congresses
In the field of modern logic, I say, then, work is doing which is
rapidly tending towards the unification of the tasks of our entire
division. For this problem of the categories, in all its abstractness,
is still a common problem for all of us. Do you ask, however, what such
researches can do to furnish more special aid to the workers in
metaphysics, in the philosophy of religion, in ethics, or in æsthetics,
beyond merely helping towards the formulation of a table of
categories--then I reply that we are already not without evidence that
such general researches, abstract though they may seem, are bearing
fruits which have much more than a merely special interest. Apart from
its most general problems, that analysis of mathematical concepts to
which I have referred has in any case revealed numerous unexpected
connections between departments of thought which had seemed to be very
widely sundered. One instance of such a connection I myself have
elsewhere discussed at length, in its general metaphysical bearings. I
refer to the logical identity which Dedekind first pointed out between
the mathematical concept of the ordinal number of series and the
philosophical concept of the formal structure of an ideally completed
self. I have maintained that this formal identity throws light upon
problems which have as genuine an interest for the student of the
philosophy of religion as for the logician of arithmetic. In the same
connection it may be remarked that, as Couturat and Russell, amongst
other writers, have very clearly and beautifully shown, the argument of
the Kantian mathematical antinomies needs to be explicitly and totally
revised in the light of Cantor's modern theory of infinite collections.
To pass at once to another, and a very different instance: The modern
mathematical conceptions of what is called group theory have already
received very wide and significant applications, and promise to bring
into unity regions of research which, until recently, appeared to have
little or nothing to do with one another. Quite lately, however, there
are signs that group theory will soon prove to be of importance for the
definition of some of the fundamental concepts of that most refractory
branch of philosophical inquiry, æsthetics. Dr. Emch, in an important
paper in the _Monist_, called attention, some time since, to the
symmetry groups to which certain æsthetically pleasing forms belong, and
endeavored to point out the empirical relations between these groups and
the æsthetic effects in question. The grounds for such a connection
between the groups in question and the observed æsthetic effects,
seemed, in the paper of Dr. Emch to be left largely in the dark. But
certain papers recently published in the country by Miss Ethel Puffer,
bearing upon the psychology of the beautiful (although the author has
approached the subject without being in the least consciously
influenced, as I understand, by the conceptions of the mathematical
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