Critical Study of Michael Potter's "Reason's Nearest Kin: Philosophies of Arithmetic from Kant to Carnap"
Résumé
Potter's book Reason's Nearest Kin tells a very important and interesting story in a novel and insightful way. It is the story of how some of the greatest philosophers and mathematicians of the late 19th and early 20th century have attempted to give philosophical accounts of arithmetic. The figures whose work Potter discusses are Frege, Dedekind, Whitehead and Russell, Wittgenstein, Ramsey, Hilbert, G¨odel, and Carnap. Of course, they all were directly or indirectly influenced by Kant, and so Kant's philosophy of arithmetic also receives extensive treatment..