Steve Russ

This chapter contains translations of excerpts from three early texts by Bolzano (written around 1810): ▪ the 1810 booklet _Contributions to a Better-Grounded Presentation of Mathematics_; ▪ the unpublished manuscript _Aetiology_; ▪ the unpublished manuscript _General Mathematics_. Topic-wise, the texts centre around scientific method and the foundations of mathematics. In the _Contributions_ Bolzano discusses grounding in connection with three topics: the classification of mathematical disciplines, the notion of ground-revealing proofs and its relation to syllogistic inferences, and finally the notion of axioms or basic propositions. In the _Aetiology_ Bolzano presents his first attempt at a rigorous, axiomatic theory of grounding and relates the concept of grounding to several concepts and issues in mathematics. In the part of _General Mathematics_ we present here, Bolzano critically assesses the Principle of Sufficient Reason and some related metaphysical issues.