[FOM] John Baez on David Corfield's book

[David Corfield]

Stephen G Simpson writes:

>I haven't read Corfield's book, but judging from this web page,
>Corfield's "anti-foundationalist" preoccupations sound similar to
>those of Tymoczko and Hersh.

If you're not with us, ...

Personally, I have no objection to what you and many other FOMers do.
On the other hand, I do feel that philosophy hasn't quite got the balance
right in its treatment of mathematics. I've just returned from an excellent
conference in Seville where several of the world's experts on the
mathematico-philosophical writings of the 1880-1930 period (Frege, Peano,
Dedekind, Hilbert, Brouwer, etc.) demonstrated time and again the
interpenetration of foundational and methodological conceptions. For
whatever reason, it is clearly the case that much of today's foundational
work is of little methodological interest. My book is an attempt to address
value judgements in mathematics other than that of being correct in one's
preferred logical system.

David Corfield
Faculty of Philosophy
University of Oxford
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~sfop0076