Abstract

I construe mathematical philosophy not in the narrow sense of philosophy of mathematics but in a broad indefinite sense of different manners of giving mathematics a privileged place in the study of philosophy. For example, in one way or another, mathematics plays an important part in the philosophy of Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Kant. In contrast, history plays a central role in the philosophy of Vico, Hegel, and Marx. In more recent times, Frege, Husserl, Russell, Ramsey, and Gödel all began as mathematicians. One way of viewing Kant’s system of philosophy might be to stress that he was struck by the synthetic a priori character of mathematical propositions. He went on to offer a remarkable account of this fact and also look for and propose synthetic a priori foundations of physics, morality, and esthetics.