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
Of the relation of metaphysics to pure mathematics it would be
impertinent for any but a trained mathematician to say very much. I must
therefore be content to point out that the same difficulty in drawing
boundary lines meets us here as in the case of logic. Not so long ago
this difficulty might have been ignored, as it still is by too many
writers on the philosophy of science. Until recently mathematics would
have been thought to be adequately defined as the science of numerical
and quantitative relations, and adequately distinguished from
metaphysics by the non-quantitative and non-numerical character of the
latter, though it would probably have been admitted that the problem of
the definition of quantity and number themselves is a metaphysical one.
But in the present state of our knowledge such an account seems doubly
unsatisfactory. On the one hand, we have to recognize the existence of
branches of mathematics, such as the so-called descriptive geometry,
which are neither quantitative nor numerical, and, on the other,
quantity as distinct from number appears to play no part in mathematical
science, while number itself, thanks to the labors of such men as Cantor
and Dedekind, seems, as I have said before, to be known now to be only a
special type of order in a series. Thus there appears to be ground for
regarding serial order as the fundamental category of mathematics, and
we are thrown back once more upon the difficult task of deciding how
many ultimately irreducible types of order there may be before we can
undertake any precise discrimination between mathematical and
metaphysical science. However we may regard the problem, it is at least
certain that the recent researches of mathematicians into the meaning of
such concepts as continuity and infinity have, besides opening up new
metaphysical problems, done much to transfigure the familiar ones, as
all readers of Professor Royce must be aware. For instance I imagine all
of us here present, even the youngest, were brought up on the
Aristotelian doctrine that there is and can be no such thing as an
actually existing infinite collection, but which of us would care to
defend that time-honored position to-day? Similarly with continuity all
of us were probably once on a time instructed that whereas "quantity" is
continuous, number is essentially "discrete," and is indeed the typical
instance of what we mean by the non-continuous. To-day we know that it
is in the number series that we have our one certain and familiar
instance of a perfect continuum. Still a third illustration of the
transforming light which is thrown upon old standing metaphysical
puzzles by the increasing formal development of mathematics may be found
in the difficulties attendant upon the conception of the "infinitely
little," once regarded as the logical foundation of the so-called
Differential Calculus. With the demonstration, which maybe found in Mr.
Russell's important work, that "infinitesimal," unlike "infinite," is a
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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