Dutch Mathematician Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer (1881-1966) was a rebel. His doctoral thesis... was the manifesto of an angry young man taking on the mathematical establishment on all fronts. In a short time he established a world-wide reputation for himself; his genius and originality were acknowledged by the great mathematicians of his time... The Intuitionist-Formalist debate became a personal feud between the mathematical giants Brouwer and Hilbert, and ended in 1928 with the expulsion of Brouwer from the editorial board of (...) the Mathematische Annalen by dictat of Hilbert. Forsaken, humiliated and disillusioned Brouwer abandoned his Intuitionist Programme and withdrew into silence just about the time when the Formalist Programme appeared to be fundamentally flawed and major opposition collapsed... This book attempts to follow the `genetic' development of Brouwer's ideas, linking the man Brouwer, his Weltanschauung, his philosophy of mathematics and his reconstruction of mathematics. Brouwer's own writings, his publications as well as his unpublished papers, are its immediate and main source of reference. It is the second volume in the new series Studies in the History and Philosophy of Mathematics, and is written for the specialist as well as for the general reader interested in mathematics and the interpretation of its status and function. (shrink)

Brouwer's Life, Art and Mysticism is the ideological manifesto of one of the greatest mathematical philosophers of this century. It is a seemingly contradictory declaration of romantic rebellion against rationalism and science by a man who brought constructivist rigor to mathematical and logical practice; the emotional plea of a fanatical environmentalist for a return to `nature', a defiant call to reject the formal trappings of society arising from a deep resentment of authority and of the intellectual and social aspects of (...) the human make-up. (shrink)

A theory of the joint measurement of quantum mechanical observables is generalized in order to make it applicable to the measurement of the local observables of field theory. Subsequently, the property of local commutativity, which is usually introduced as a postulate, is derived by means of the theory of measurement from a requirement of mutual nondisturbance, which, for local observables performed at a spacelike distance from each other, is interpreted as a requirement of macrocausality. Alternative attempts at establishing a deductive (...) relationship between relativistic causality and local commutativity are reviewed, but found wanting, either because of the assumption of an unwarranted objectivity of the object system (algebraic approach) or because of the use of a projection postulate (operational approach). Finally, the quantum mechanical nonobjectivity is related to certain features of nonlocality which are present in the formalism of quantum mechanics. (shrink)

There is an increasing body of research on what kind of ethical challenges health care professionals experience regarding the quality of care. In the Netherlands the Dutch Health Care Inspectorate is responsible for monitoring and regulating the quality of health care. No research exists on what kind of ethical challenges inspectors experience during the regulation process itself. In a pilot study we used moral case deliberation as method in order to reflect upon inspectors’ ethical challenges. The objective of this paper (...) is to give an overview of the ethical challenges which health care inspectors encounter in their daily work. A thematic qualitative analysis was performed on cases that were collected from health care inspectors in a moral case deliberation pilot study. Eight themes were identified in health care regulation. These can be divided in two categories: work content and internal collaboration. The work of the health care inspectorate is morally loaded and our recommendation is that some form of ethics support is provided for health care inspectors. (shrink)