Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Mathematics

Wittgenstein played a vital role in establishing mathematics as one of this century's principal areas of philosophic inquiry. In this book, Pasquale Frascolla examines the three phases of Wittgenstein's reflections on mathematics, considering them as a progressive whole rather than as separate entities. Frascolla discusses the development of Wittgenstein's views on mathematics from theTractatusup to 1944. He looks at the presentation of arithmetic in the theory of logical operations, the presence of a strong verificationist orientation and the rule-following considerations in Wittgenstein's writings. Frascolla identifies a unifying key--a "quasi-formalism"--to the development of Wittgenstein's reflections on mathematics.