Abstract

Bernard Bolzano (1781-1848) was an original and independent thinker, who left a lasting legacy in several areas of philosophy. Four such areas are singled for special attention: political philosophy, ethics and theology, logics and semantics, and mathematics. In all these areas he was far ahead of his time. He had pioneering ideas in political philosophy and in ethics and philosophy of religion, and he argued for them in a brilliantly clear way. In logic and semantics he anticipated Frege, Carnap and Quine on important points, and he had intriguing, yet to be explored, ideas on intuition and other fundamental philosophical notions. In the foundations of mathematical analysis and the theory of infinite sets he anticipated Weierstrass and Cantor.