Javier Legris

This volume of Metatheoria includes translations into Spanish of the three famous papers on the schools in foundations of mathematics, logicism, intuitionism and formalism, presented at the Königsberg’s Symposium on Foundations of Mathematics in September 1930 and finally published in the journal Erkenntnis in 1931. The three papers constituted a milestone in the Philosophy of Mathematics of the last century. In this introduction to the translations, the editors of the volume outline the historical context in which the original papers were conceived and they include some details concerning their original publication. They also stress the decisive role played by the papers in the philosophy of mathematics in the last century. A summary of them is provided and the underlying ideas of the Vienna Circle on the nature of mathematics and the impact of Gödel theorems in the foundations programs are discussed. Moreover, they briefly introduce the original contributions to the volume that follow the translations.

In the last century Jaakko Hintikka tried to determine Peirce’s locus within the framework of the “Logic as Calculus vs. Logic as Universal Language” opposition in the history of mathematical logic, placing it in the former tradition. For this purpose Hintikka reformulated the opposition devised earlier by Jean van Heijenoort in order to investigate not only the development of notations and formal languages in the origins of mathematical logic but also the very original ideas in them. The aim of this paper is to show some difficulties in placing Peirce’s diagrammatic conception of deductive logic inside this opposition. Firstly, Hintikka’s distinction presupposes a linguistic conception of logic by the founders of mathematical logic. However this was not Peirce’s own ultimate conception. Secondly, there is now enough evidence that Peirce conceived his diagrammatic system of the Existential Graphs mainly as a tool for logical analysis. This analysis is not of linguistic nature but rather of a semiotic one.