History of Logic" Seminar Series - Talk: F. Biagioli, "Dedekindian Abstraction and Its Philosophical Background" (19.06.2025)
antpic...@gmail.com
I am happy to announce the ninth session of our History of Logic seminar series. This session concludes our first annual cycle. On behalf of the other organizers, I would like to start this announcement by thanking everyone who has contributed to the success of this seminar series since its inception.
The final session of the first cycle will be held on Thursday, June 19, from 4:00 pm to 6:00 pm Central European Summer Time (CEST). It will be held in a hybrid format. We will meet at the Franchini Lecture Hall of the Department of Humanities of the University of Naples Federico II (Stairs B, Third Floor - Maps).
The session will be broadcast via Zoom. To have the Zoom link, please contact us at historyofl...@gmail.com
On this occasion, we will host a talk by Francesca Biagioli, Professor of History of Philosophy at the University of Turin. Her research focuses on post-Kantian philosophy, historical epistemology, the history and philosophy of mathematics and logic, with a special focus on Cassirer. She authored Space, Number, and Geometry from Helmholtz to Cassirer (2016). She also gave significant contributions to issues concerning the relationship between structuralism and mathematical practices, as well as between transcendental philosophy and mathematical reasoning.
Her talk is titled Dedekindian Abstraction and Its Philosophical Background. Here is a short abstract:
Dedekind is known to have made fundamental contributions to the modern axiomatization of number theory using various abstraction procedures in a series of writings from 1872-1888. However, his way of proceeding has been interpreted in different ways. Whereas some saw it as offering a clear example of structural or axiomatic definitions of abstract mathematical objects (regardless – and sometimes despite – his language of “abstraction” and “creation”), others deemed it to show a psychological understanding of abstraction conflating genetic with axiomatic methods. This paper aims to gain insight into the notion of abstraction at work in these writings by placing it in the context of nineteenth-century attempts to conceptualize ideal objects such as Moritz Wilhelm Drobisch’s and Hermann Lotze’s. Dedekind’s connections to nineteenth-century logic open the door a non-psychologistic rendering of his procedure as first proposed by the neo-Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer, and more recently by Erich Reck and Audrey Yap. It will be suggested that this line of interpretation is worth exploring further, not only because it sheds light on the philosophical background of Dedekind’s notion, but also because it brings out the premises for a specific version of mathematical structuralism.
For more information, please visit our website. Feel free to share the news and invite other scholars to subscribe to this mailing list, and do not hesitate to contact historyofl...@gmail.com with any questions you might have.
In other news, we recently announced a call for abstracts for the first Workshop on the History of Logic (website). The workshop will take place on October 22-23 at the University of Naples, and it will mark the beginning of the second cycle (2025/2026) of our seminar series. We will share more information about the new cycle through this mailing list. Stay tuned!
Kind regards,
Antonio Piccolomini d'Aragona