Two-track depictions of Leibniz's fictions (Q6169811)

The authors discuss the contents of a list of 34 references, all dealing with a meaningful notion of the so-called ``Leibniz fictions''. That discussion is presented by means of an ``Alice versus Bob'' style. In order to deal with the contents, I mention the titles of the sections, leaving the details to the reader: \begin{itemize} \item[1.] Introduction; \item[2.] Law and \textit{fictio juris}; \item[3.] Reference to violation of Euclid V.4; \item[4.] Fictions, useful fictions, and well-founded fictions; \item[5.] Infinite cardinalities and infinite quantities; \item[6.] Bounded infinities from Leibniz to Skolem; \item[7.] Leibniz's rebuttal of Bernoulli's inference from series; \item[8.] Mathematical possibility; \item[9.] A-track and B-track. \end{itemize} The ``A-track and B-track'' section is a very condensed survey of the earlier sections. It runs as follows: ``Alice (A) and Bob (B) represent a pair of rival depictions in the scholarly debate concerning the interpretation of Leibniz's fictional quantities such as infinitesimals and their reciprocals. On the A-track reading, these quantities, just like infinite wholes violating the part-whole axiom, were contradictory concepts; the expression ``fictional entities'' describing them harbors a contradiction. Consequently, this reading denies that infinitesimals were the very basis of the calculus; formulations that use them were merely figures of speech, abbreviating the Archimedean unwrappings thereof. On the B-track reading, what Leibniz viewed as contradictory was only infinite wholes (involving a contradiction with the part-whole axiom), but not infinite and infinitesimal quantities. The latter were useful and well-founded fictions involving a violation of the Archimedean property. Their legitimacy as mathematical entities emanated from their consistency, in an early form of Hilbert's formalism.''