Readings

For this session, we will answer the title’s question with the short and sweet: John P. Burgess’s Why I Am Not a Nominalist, a broad overview against various forms of nominalism.

Burgess responds to nominalist attempts to dispense with abstract objects in mathematical and scientific discourse, challenging both instrumentalist and reconstructionist forms of nominalism, among other; arguing that they fail to provide a viable alternative to the standard use of mathematics in science. He maintans that nominalism, rather than Platonism, bears the real “burden of proof”. His critique adresses Goodman, Quine, and Field, among others.

For our first session of 2025, we will engage with Robin Jeshion’s Intuiting the Infinite. He defends Charles Parsons’ Kantian appeal to mathematical intuition to address the access problem of Platonism: If mathematical objects are abstract objects, how can we gain knowledge of them?

Jeshion argues that intuition plays a fundamental role in justifying our knowledge of the infinitude of natural numbers, responding to key criticisms about the cogency of arbitrary objects, vague representation, and the role of spatial and temporal structures in mathematical thought.

In this session we will deal with a critique to some main ideas of Predicativists. They believe that, in some respects, arithmetic has some advantages that analysis and set-theory do not. Koellner puts this idea to the test.

Main Readings:

• Koellner, Peter (2016). Infinity up on Trial: Reply to Feferman. Journal of Philosophy 113 (5/6):247-260.

After talking about the infinite and Frege Arithmetic, it is time to turn to potentialism about set-theory. In this session we will turn to potentiality about the height of the cumulative hierarchy.

Main Readings:

• Soysal, Z. (2024). Why be a Height Potentialist?. Journal for the Philosophy of Mathematics, 1, 155–175. https://doi.org/10.36253/jpm-2938

Our second meeting of the year continues along the lines of potentialism. Now we turn to Frege Arithmetic and a genuinely potentialist account of it.

Welcome to PhiMath 2024! In our first meeting for this academic year, we will discuss a paper by Linnebo and Shapiro on the notion of Potential Infinity.

For our final meeting on structuralism, we cover the modal set-theoretic structuralism from Parsons and Linnebø. This rounds out the book we have been following and also our time with structuralism (for now).

For our next meeting on structuralism, we will be covering the two views championed by the authors of the textboock: Shapiro’s ante rem, or Sui Generis, structuralism and Hellman’s Modal Structuralism.

Main Readings

Chapter 5 and 6 in Hellman, G., & Shapiro, S. (2018). Mathematical Structuralism (Elements in the Philosophy of Mathematics). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781108582933

For our second meeting on Structuralism in mathematics, we will be focusing on the category-theoretical side of the discussion. Stemming from work in algebraic topology, category theory has since the 1950’s become an indisposable tool for mainstream mathematics and is seen by some to encode the structuralist philosophy into mathematics itself. We will be reading and discussing some thoughts around the plausibility of using category-theoretic foundations for mathematics and whether this really follows the structuralist philosophy.

We are now covering the theory of structuralism in mathematics. This first meeting will be an overview of the general position and its various parts together with specific focus on set-theoretic structuralism. Over the course of the coming meetings, we will spend some time on various conceptions of structuralism and their proponents.