It was by studying Spinoza's Ethics, Wittgenstein's Tractatus, and Aristotle’s Physics, that I first became seriously interested in philosophy. It soon became apparent that Spinoza's metaphysics suffered from confusion surrounding the concept of infinity, and so it was necessary, Bertrand Russell's writings assured me, to detour into mathematics and the history and philosophy of mathematics to remedy that defect. Clarifying the concept of infinity proved an endless task, but it left me with an enduring interest in the epistemology and philosophy of mathematics. Deductive geometrical knowledge such as is found in Euclid's Elements has always …

Read more