Felix Kaufmann's philosophy of mathematics in the context of the Vienna Circle

Philosophy of Science Colloquium
The Institute Vienna Circle holds a Philosophy of Science Colloquium with talks by our present fellows.

Date: 02/11/2023

Time: 15h00

Venue: New Institute Building (NIG), Universitätsstraße 7, 1010 Wien, SR 2H

Abstract:

Felix Kaufmann was the first figure within the vicinity of the Vienna Circle to devote a whole monograph to the philosophy of mathematics. The result, Kaufmann's The Infinite in Mathematics and its Elimination (1930), however, is surprisingly out of line with the Vienna Circle: In it Kaufmann articulates a defense of Brouwerian Intuitionism on the basis of Husserl's phenomenology. Unpublished documents and letters further underscore these differences, showing Kaufmann, e.g., explicitly request not to be included in the list of "affiliated authors" in the 1929 brochure on Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung (in a letter to Carnap) because he did not think of himself as sharing the empiricism championed there. My aim is to reconstruct how Kaufmann came to write his book and why he adopted the position he articulates in it, then compare and contrast Kaufmann's views to those other members of the Vienna Circle expressed either later on in print (such as Waismann or Carnap) or mainly in lectures (such as Schlick). Finally, I will take my survey of these different approaches as an opportunity to reflect on the general question what one could, and should, expect from a philosophy of mathematics.