(Zwarenstein, 2024)
What has the conscious, intentional human mind to do with the nature and status of logic and mathematics? Are irreducible facts about the human mind essential to logic and mathematics, or are logic and mathematics essentially mindless even if accidentally
connected to human minds by means of contingent episodes of thinking? The rejection of idealism and psychologism in the early 20th century origins of Analytic philosophy initiated the process of (as Michael Dummett aptly puts it) “extruding” the human mind from the theoretical content of logic and mathematics; the failures of the Hilbert and Brouwer programs of intuitionism in the 1930s hastened the extrusion process; then the messy divorce of Analytic philosophy and Phenomenology in the late 1940s and early 1950s completed it. Nevertheless, as Robert Hanna argues in “Logic, Mathematics and the Mind,” there are some serious foundational problems for essentially mindless logic and essentially mindless mathematics alike, and also that there are some correspondingly strong arguments for systematically reintroducing irreducible facts about the conscious, intentional human mind into the foundations of logic and mathematics. Hanna has already argued for putting facts about the human mind back into the foundations of logic in Rationality and Logic (Hanna, 2006). Here, he develops a parallel but distinct argument for putting facts about the human mind back into the foundations of mathematics, by means of a critical study of Richard Tieszen’s very interesting, informative, and clearly-written book, Phenomenology, Logic, and the Philosophy of Mathematics. This line of argument was later fully developed in Hanna’s Cognition, Content, and the A Priori (Hanna, 2015: chs. 6-8).
REFERENCES
(Hanna, 2006). Hanna, R. Rationality and Logic. Cambridge: MIT Press. Available online in preview at URL = <https://www.academia.edu/21202624/Rationality_and_Logic>.
(Hanna, 2015). Hanna, R. Cognition, Content, and the A Priori: A Study in the Philosophy of Mind and Knowledge . THE RATIONAL HUMAN CONDITION, Vol. 5. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. Available online in preview HERE.
(Zwarenstein, 2024). Zwarenstein, C. “Numbers Game: Is Math the Language of Nature or Just a Human Construct?” Salon. 27 July. Available online at URL = <https://www.salon.com/2024/07/27/numbers-game-is-math-the-language-of-nature-or-just-a-human-construct/>.
You can find an accessible but also fully detailed podcast on Hanna’s “Logic, Mathematics, and the Mind,” created by Scott Heftler and other friends of Philosophy Without Borders, HERE.
And you can also download and read or share a .pdf of the full text of “Logic, Mathematics, and the Mind” by clicking on the Download tab directly below.
Against Professional Philosophy is a sub-project of the online mega-project Philosophy Without Borders, which is home-based on Patreon here.
Please consider becoming a patron!
