4 ideas
18086 | Weierstrass eliminated talk of infinitesimals [Weierstrass, by Kitcher] |
Full Idea: Weierstrass effectively eliminated the infinitesimalist language of his predecessors. | |
From: report of Karl Weierstrass (works [1855]) by Philip Kitcher - The Nature of Mathematical Knowledge 10.6 |
18092 | Weierstrass made limits central, but the existence of limits still needed to be proved [Weierstrass, by Bostock] |
Full Idea: After Weierstrass had stressed the importance of limits, one now needed to be able to prove the existence of such limits. | |
From: report of Karl Weierstrass (works [1855]) by David Bostock - Philosophy of Mathematics 4.4 | |
A reaction: The solution to this is found in work on series (going back to Cauchy), and on Dedekind's cuts. |
7319 | If we give up synonymy, we have to give up significance, meaning and sense [Grice/Strawson] |
Full Idea: If we are to give up the notion of sentence-synonymy as senseless, we must give up the notion of sentence-significance (of a sentence having meaning) as senseless too. But then perhaps we might as well give up the notion of sense. | |
From: P Grice / P Strawson (In Defense of a Dogma [1956]), quoted by Alexander Miller - Philosophy of Language 4.2 | |
A reaction: This is very prescient. Nearly all American philosophers seem to embrace Quine's view of analyticity (the philosophical equivalent of Americans putting a man on the moon?), but have they digested the implications (which Quine later largely admits)? |
1513 | The Egyptians were the first to say the soul is immortal and reincarnated [Herodotus] |
Full Idea: The Egyptians were the first to claim that the soul of a human being is immortal, and that each time the body dies the soul enters another creature just as it is being born. | |
From: Herodotus (The Histories [c.435 BCE], 2.123.2) |