[FOM] Why Bother?

[Hartley Slater]

It sounds like things are getting to their bedrock with Friedman (FOM 
Digest Vol 10 Issue 30).   Unfortunately, questions such as whether 
von Neumann's ordinals satisfy Tennant's adequacy condition on a 
theory of number, and can escape Benacerraf's points about what 
numbers cannot be, are only scratching the surface.  One has to dig 
deeper to get to the bottom of the problem: see the abstract of my 'A 
Short Lesson in Logic' on pp263-4 of the current BSL (Vol 9.2, June 
2003).  An electronic copy of the full paper is available on request.

Why bother?  Because the foundations of mathematics have been 
mis-represented for 100 years.
-- 
Barry Hartley Slater
Honorary Senior Research Fellow
Philosophy, M207 School of Humanities
University of Western Australia
35 Stirling Highway
Crawley WA 6009, Australia
Ph: (08) 9380 1246 (W), 9386 4812 (H)
Fax: (08) 9380 1057
Url: http://www.arts.uwa.edu.au/PhilosWWW/Staff/slater.html