Sie befinden Sich nicht im Netzwerk der Universität Paderborn. Der Zugriff auf elektronische Ressourcen ist gegebenenfalls nur via VPN oder Shibboleth (DFN-AAI) möglich.
mehr Informationen...
Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 2020-09, Vol.102 (3), p.379-425
Ort / Verlag
De Gruyter
Erscheinungsjahr
2020
Link zum Volltext
Quelle
Alma/SFX Local Collection
Beschreibungen/Notizen
Avicenna believed in mathematical finitism. He argued that magnitudes and sets of ordered numbers and numbered things cannot be actually infinite. In this paper, I discuss his arguments against the actuality of mathematical infinity. A careful analysis of the subtleties of his main argument, i. e.,
, shows that, by employing the notion of
as a tool for comparing the sizes of mathematical infinities, he arrived at a very deep and insightful understanding of the notion of mathematical infinity, one that is much more modern than we might expect. I argue, moreover, that Avicenna’s mathematical finitism is interwoven with his literalist ontology of mathematics, according to which mathematical objects are properties of existing physical objects.