ENGLISH

David Hume's Critique of Infinity

By Dale Jacquette

Book information

Publisher
Brill Academic Publishers
Year
2000
ISBN
9004116494, 9789004116498
ISSN
0920-8607
LCC
B1499.I67 J33 2001
Open Library ID
OL6787855M
Language
english
Format
DJVU
Filesize
3 MB (2657290 bytes)
Series
Brill's Studies in Intellectual History 102
Pages
384\401
Library
Kolxo3
DPI
600
Time added
2009-12-04 00:34:26

Description

This new study of David Hume s philosophy of mathematics critically examines his objections to the concept of infinity. Although infinity raises some of the most challenging paradoxes for Hume s empiricism, there have been few detailed and no fully comprehensive systematic discussions of Hume s critique. In a series of eight interrelated arguments, Hume maintains that we cannot experience and therefore can have no adequate idea of infinity or of the infinite divisibility of extension. He proposes to replace the notion of infinity with an alternative phenomenalist theory of space and time as constituted by minima sensibilia or sensible extensionless indivisibles. The present work considers Hume s critique of infinity in historical context as a product of Enlightenment theory of knowledge, and assesses the prospects of his strict finitism in light of contemporary mathematics, science, and philosophy."

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