Mario Pieri's address at the University of Catania (Q716160)

Mario Pieri (1860-1913) was an authoritative member of Peano's school of mathematics, that flourished between the end of the 19-th and the first decades of the 20-th century. The paper deals with the opinions of Pieri about mathematics. Even though not a well-tailored philosophy of science, Pieri's ideas show the impact on the italian science of the most influential lines of thought in the earlier debates about the foundations of mathematics: the detachment from the strict relation with the physical reality and from positivism, the search for a more logical and rigorous approach, the role of the freedom to create new abstract mathematical concepts, the role of intuition, the hypothetical-deductive systems of Hilbert's formalism.