Towards completeness: Husserl on theories of manifolds 1890--1901 (Q885542)

The founder of transcendental phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, was trained a mathematician (variational calculus) and argued philosophically and mathematically against psychologism. The author reconstructs carefully and partly based on archival material a pair of lectures which Husserl gave in front of the mathematical society in Göttingen (1901). She shows that Husserl's notion of definiteness is closely connected to categoricity and completeness. She analyses the influence of H. Hankel's principle of permanence, H. Grassmann's theory of manifolds, and G. Cantor's theory of sets on Husserl und discusses definiteness in the light of Gödel's incompleteness results.