Displaying similar documents to “It’s not that they couldn’t”

A Programmatic Note: on two Types of Intertextuality

Reviel Netz (2005)

Revue d'histoire des mathématiques

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The note addresses briefly some reactions to a previous article “”. In particular it looks at the question: if indeed any text must depend on previous texts, what makes the dependency of commentary and commentary-like text so special to justify my emphasis on this form of writing ? A suggestion is developed, trying to define Deuteronomic texts through their precise semiotics of intertextuality: in general, it is argued, intertextuality may be paradigmatic (= allusion) or syntagmatic...

Mathematics and Morality on the Cusp of Modernity

Peter Dear (2001)

Revue d'histoire des mathématiques

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This note suggests that a fruitful way of investigating the history of mathematics lies in consideration of its pedagogical purposes. As a general illustration of the directions that such an approach might take, the paper discusses early-modern arguments for the practical utility of mathematics and its capacity to inculcate good habits of thought, as well as the appearance of new uses for mathematical training in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that served the purpose...

Positive Thinking. Conceptions of Negative Quantities in the Netherlands and the Reception of Lacroix’s Algebra Textbook

Danny J. Beckers (2000)

Revue d'histoire des mathématiques

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The beginning of the 19th century witnessed the emergence of several new approaches to negative numbers. New notions of rigour made the 18th century conceptions of negative quantities unacceptable. This paper discusses theories of negative numbers emerging in the Netherlands in the early 19th century. Dutch mathematicians then opted for a different approach than that of their contemporaries, in Germany or France. The Dutch translation (1821) of Lacroix’s illustrates the ‘Dutch’ notion...

Thomas Harriot on Combinations

Ian Maclean (2005)

Revue d'histoire des mathématiques

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Thomas Harriot (1560?–1621) is known today as an innovative mathematician and a natural philosopher with wide intellectual horizons. This paper will look at his interest in combinations in three contexts: language (anagrams), natural philosophy (the question of atomism) and mathematics (number theory), in order to assess where to situate him in respect of three current historiographical debates: 1) whether there existed in the late Renaissance two opposed mentalities, the occult and...

Mathematical practice and naturalist epistemology : structures with potential for interaction

Bart Van Kerkhove, Jean Paul Van Bendegem (2005)

Philosophia Scientiae

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In current philosophical research, there is a rather one-sided focus on the foundations of proof. A full picture of mathematical practice should however additionally involve considerations about various methodological aspects. A number of these is identified, from large-scale to small-scale ones. After that, naturalism, a philosophical school concerned with scientific practice, is looked at, as far as the translations of its epistemic principles to mathematics is concerned. Finally,...