Publisher's Synopsis
Bob Hale and Crispin Wright draw together here the key writings in which they have worked out their distinctive neo-Fregean approach to the philosophy of mathematics. The two main components in Frege's mathematical philosophy were his platonism and his logicism -- the claims, respectively, that mathematics is a body of knowledge about independently existing objects, and that this knowledge may be acquired on the basis of general logical laws and suitable definitions. The central;thesis of this collection is that Frege was -- his own eventual recantation notwithstanding -- substantially right in both claims. Where neo-Fregeanism principally differs from Frege is in taking a more optimistic view of the kind of contextual explanation (proceeding via what are now commonly called;abstraction principles) of the fundamental concepts of arithmetic and analysis which Frege considered and rejected. On this basis, neo-Fregeanism promises defensible and attractive answers to some of the most important ontological and epistemological questions in the philosophy of mathematics.;In addition to fourteen previously published papers, the volume features a new paper on the Julius Caesar problem; a substantial new introduction mapping out the programme and the contributions made to it by the various papers; a postscript explaining which issues most require further attention; and bibliographies both of references and of further useful sources. The Reason's Proper Study will be recognized as the most powerful presentation yet of the neo-Fregean programme; it will;prove indispensable reading not just to philosophers of mathematics but to all who are interested in the fundamental metaphysical and epistemological issues on which the programme impinges.
