Abstract
We shall offer some remarks concerning the philosophical debate on science at the turn of the 18th century, especially on the concept of science as a language, and relate these remarks to some characteristic features in the development of mathematics. Other disciplines will thus not be referred to directly. Indirectly, however, one can learn something for a better evaluation of their development from studying that of mathematics. Mathematics (with the possible exception of chemistry) is the one science for which the hypothesis of a breach in its epistemological and ontological conceptions at the turn of the 18h century can be most easily verified. We are taking this as evidence for the assumption that the development of mathematics at that point of time was particularly dependent on the development within the overall context of the sciences in general, and of the way mathematics was integrated into these. It should thus be possible, from an analysis of the mathematics science of that time, to obtain questions and problems providing promising access to an investigation of this context.
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Jahnke, H.N., Otte, M. (1981). On “Science as a Language”. In: Jahnke, H.N., Otte, M. (eds) Epistemological and Social Problems of the Sciences in the Early Nineteenth Century. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-8414-1_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-8414-1_6
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