Continental philosophy of math

I am about as far from the continental tradition in 20th-21st C philosophy as you can get. Some of my students, however, are not, and they keep asking me questions about what various continental people would say in response to issues coming up in our philosophy of math discussions.

So I've done what any self-respecting academic would do: I've gone to twitter to ask for recommendations on continental philosophy of math

Another query for the hive mind: Continental philosophy of mathematics. Is there any such thing? Deleuze? Merleau-Ponty? Send me refs!

— Sara L. Uckelman (@SaraLUckelman) March 9, 2017

I've now gotten enough recommendations that it makes sense to collate them all in a blog post. Note that that is all this is: a collation. I haven't read any of these texts, don't even recognize many of the authors, and thus inclusion here is not any indication of quality or agreement!

• Badiou, Alain, Being and Event (on set theory); here's a review of it.
• Badiou, Alain, Mathematics of the Transcendental
• Bergson. Here's a chapter on "An Outline of Bergson's Philosophy of Mathematics" by Milič Čapek.
• Brunschvicg, Leon, Les étapes de la philosophie mathématique
• Cassou-Noguès, Pierre, De l'expérience mathématique: Essai sur la philosophie des sciences de Jean Cavaillès
• Cavaillès, Jean.
• Connes, Alain, A View of Mathematics
• Corfield, David, Towards a Philosophy of Real Mathematics (link is to an NDPR).
• Derrida, Jacques, Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry
• Duffy, Simon B.
• Kroyé, Alexandre, on infinity before & after scientific revolution
• Lakatos (described as having "a very Hegelian strand")
• Lautman, Albert (one of Deleuze's sources)
• Lochak, Pierre, Mathématiques et finitude
• Mader, Mary Beth, Sleights of Reason.
• Mancosu, Paolo & T. A. Ryckman, "Mathematics and phenomenology: The correspondence between O. Becker and H. Weyl", which "sheds new light on Weyl's engagement with Husserlian transcendental phenomenology".
• Martin, Bill, specifically his work on Badiou.
• Philosophy Stack Exchange thread oncontinental philosophers who worked on philosophy of math
• Salanskis, Jean-Michel, Philosophie des mathématiques
• Salanskis, Jean-Michel, Philosophie française et philosophie analytique au XXe siècle
• Serres, Michel, Le système de Leibniz et ses modèles mathématiques"
• Tragesser, Robert S., Husserl and Realism in Logic and Mathematics
• Vuillemin, Jules, "La philosophie de l'algèbre"
• Zalamea, Fernando, Synthetic Philosophy of Contemporary Mathematics

Another useful note:

@SaraLUckelman Per Martin-Löf is a huge deal in type theory and uses Husserl a lot! https://t.co/DQxw5abauM

— vape resort (@mmultiplier) March 9, 2017

And now I want to teach a class where I can use this as an essay question:

@SaraLUckelman Suggested topic: Frege and Badiou are both (described as) Platonists. What, if anything do they have in common beyond that?

— Philosopher wo Docs. (@prgodbarebones) March 9, 2017

I'll continue to update this page as further suggestions come in.

How did we know things before the internet?

Last night re-reading ch. 5 of Shapiro's Thinking of Mathematics, preparing for this morning's seminar, I realized that my students might not actually be familiar with the import of his example of Fermat's Theorem.

I remember very distinctly the progress of Wiles's presentation and the final published proof. It is a vivid memory, in that I followed the development day by day, catching the excitement as people suddenly started speculating, is he going to prove that I think he's going to prove? And then he did! This centuries-old "theorem" had finally become a theorem! It was amazing, and the process was a definitive moment in my scientific upbringing.

I thought back on these memories last night, and tried to triangulate exactly when it happened. My edition of Shapiro's book was published in 2000, and I figured it had to have been not too much before that, '97 or '98. (But in retrospect, writing this now, even '98 would've been rather early for me to have been so interested in the result; that was the year I took my first logic class, and prior to that I was still very much a math-phobe). Then I did the math and realized that there was a very good chance that not only would my students not know about the importance of Wiles's proof, but that they might not even have been born. #waytomakemefeelold.

Earlier this evening I decided to find out exactly when Wiles's proof was, and looked it up, only to find that the presentation was in 1994, and the proof in 1995.

Nineteen Ninety-Four. NINETY-FOUR. I was TWELVE.

But relative chronology and whether I feel old or young isn't the point of this post. The point of this post is that if Wiles's proof happened in '94-'95, I have no idea how I knew anything about it. Part of the reason I assumed it had to be '97 or '98 was that surely I followed the progress of it via the internet. Surely. But...in 1994, we didn't have internet at home. We didn't own a TV. (Well, we did. But it was stored in the basement, unplugged.) We didn't subscribe to any newspapers, and I lived in a small town in central Wisconsin so I'm pretty sure I didn't hear about it over the radio.

This is mystifying. How on earth did I know things before the internet? And isn't it weird that I remember distinctly the process of receiving this information, but not the means by which I received it?