Product Description: This volume offers a guided tour of modern mathematics' Garden of Eden, beginning with perspectives on the finite universe and classes and Aristotelian logic. Author Mary Tiles further examines permutations, combinations, and infinite cardinalities; numbering the continuum; Cantor's transfinite paradise; axiomatic set theory, and more...read more

As science becomes more heavily mathematical and as computers continue to infiltrate life in affluent societies, the philosopher's concern with mathematics has, paradoxically, dwindled. It has come to be tacitly presumed that mathematics is nothing but logic.Concentrating on three key figures in the philosophy of mathematics--Frege, Russell, and Hilbert--Mary Tiles seeks to dispel the misconception that scientific rationality and the character of reason is merely pure logic--and therefore inherently at odds with imagination. Tiles argues against those who see mathematics as uncreative and irrelevant to our postmodern, post-structuralist age.

Product Description: Challenging traditionally held assumptions about the relationship between "man and machine" this book opens up wider debate on the shape of things to come and whether we should be trying to change them now.

Product Description: Challenging traditionally held assumptions about the relationship between "man and machine" this book opens up wider debate on the shape of things to come and whether we should be trying to change them now.

Product Description: This introduction to the theory of knowledge argues for the continuing relevance of philosophical debates about knowledge by connecting them to issues of authority. The discussion takes the form of an essay in historical epistemology which treats the philosopher-politician Frnacis Bacon as its pivotal figure...read more

Product Description: Did Cantor discover the rich and strange world of transfinite sets (which Hilbert was to call Cantor's "Paradise") or did he create it? Are set theorists now discovering more about the universe to which Cantor showed us the way, are they discovering more about what he created or are they continuing the creative process? Set theory is a product of the 19th-century movement to impose increasing rigour on mathematics, which culminated in the logicism of Frege and Russell and the formalism of Hilbert...read more

Product Description: This is the first critically evaluative study of Gaston Bachelard's philosophy of science to be written in English. Bachelard's professional reputation was based on his philosophy of science, though that aspect of his thought has tended to be neglected by his English-speaking readers...read more