Commentary on Menger and Intuitionism

Dirk van Dalen

A chapter in Selecta Mathematica, 2003, pp 3-8 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Of all the enigmas with which intuitionism confronted the world, that of “spread” was the most perplexing. Brouwer’s first definition [3], 13 lines long, was so exotic that hardly anyone could grasp it. When he returned to the definition in [4, 5], he apologetically remarked, “The circumstances that the definition of spread is long-winded can unfortunately not be helped”. The notion indeed suffered from a number of pedagogical deficiencies. The worst one seems to be the choice of terminology; in his German presentation Brouwer used the term “Menge”, thereby almost inviting confusion. In order to understand Brouwer’s terminology, one has to bear in mind that ever since his dissertation (1907), he sought to characterise the “possible sets” of the constructive universe [1, 2].

Date: 2003
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-7091-6045-9_1

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783709160459

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-7091-6045-9_1

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Springer Books from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().