Description: Wittgenstein once said that his aim was to make the philosophical problems 'completely disappear', a remark that has baffled philosophers ever since. In this book, Sorin Bangu reconstructs and defends Wittgenstein's unusual idea, and applies it to the traditional problems in philosophy of mathematics, setting out and explaining the subtleties of what is considered the most difficult area of Wittgenstein's views. He also considers how, according to the later Wittgenstein, we should think of the relation between philosophy and mathematics, articulating Wittgenstein's 'normativist' dissolution strategy and explaining his 'therapeutic' vision of the relation between the two disciplines. His book shows how these controversial views sit within the context of current debates in the philosophy of mathematics, and mounts a detailed and convincing defence of the radical eliminative claim - that philosophy of mathematics after Wittgenstein is devoid of its traditional problems.
Brief description: Sorin Bangu is Professor of Philosophy at University of Bergen. He is the author of The Applicability of Mathematics in Science: Indispensability and Ontology (2012), and editor of Naturalizing Logico-Mathematical Knowledge: Approaches from Philosophy, Psychology and Cognitive Science (2018).
Review Quotes: 'In Philosophy of Mathematics after Wittgenstein, Sorin Bangu takes on the steep challenge of defending - both as a scholarly interpretation and as an independent philosophical position - Wittgenstein's radical claim that all traditional philosophical problems about mathematics can be dissolved or eliminated. To an impressive degree, he succeeds in this, weaving a meticulous, closely argued, patiently defended story of how various tools of 'eliminative normativism' function in seven particular cases, ranging from 2+2=4 to Cantor's theorem.' Penelope Maddy, University of California, Irvine