Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit Subscriptions.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

You can register for a free account to have four complimentary articles per month. We will occasionally email you a newsletter, from which you can unsubscribe at any time. We do not sell personal data or otherwise disclose personal information to other organisations.

Articles

What is the Philosophy of Mathematics?

Stephen Ferguson asks whether mathematical objects are real.

I work on the philosophy of mathematics – in fact, I’m just finishing off my PhD dissertation. When I meet people and they ask what I do, they always look puzzled by my reply. Typical responses include surprise that mathematics has a philosophy, complete bewilderment, or else they conclude that I must do some form of esoteric mathematics and confess that they could never get their head round maths when they were at school. The situation is usually slightly better when I meet other philosophers – they know that it has something to do with Bertrand Russell; sometimes they will mention Wittgenstein or even Frege or Gödel. But no-one ever seems to be able to put their finger on just what it is that I do.

…