相关论文: Controversies in the foundations of analysis: Comm…

19th century real analysis received a major impetus from Cauchy's work. Cauchy mentions variable quantities, limits, and infinitesimals, but the meaning he attached to these terms is not identical to their modern meaning. Some Cauchy…

In this paper we use theoretical frameworks from mathematics education and cognitive psychology to analyse Cauchy's ideas of function, continuity, limit and infinitesimal expressed in his Cours D'Analyse. Our analysis focuses on the…

Did Leibniz exploit infinitesimals and infinities `a la rigueur, or only as shorthand for quantified propositions that refer to ordinary Archimedean magnitudes? Chapter 5 in (Ishiguro 1990) is a defense of the latter position, which she…

Like his colleagues de Prony, Petit, and Poisson at the Ecole Polytechnique, Cauchy used infinitesimals in the Leibniz-Euler tradition both in his research and teaching. Cauchy applied infinitesimals in an 1826 work in differential geometry…

Cauchy published his Cours d'Analyse 200 years ago. We analyze Cauchy's take on the concepts of rigor, continuity, and limit, and explore a pair of approaches in the literature to the meaning of his infinitesimal analysis and his sum…

We examine some recent scholarship on Leibniz's philosophy of the infinitesimal calculus. We indicate difficulties that arise in articles by Bassler, Knobloch, and Arthur, due to a denial to Leibniz's infinitesimals of the status of…

We explore Leibniz's understanding of the differential calculus, and argue that his methods were more coherent than is generally recognized. The foundations of the historical infinitesimal calculus of Newton and Leibniz have been a target…

Procedures relying on infinitesimals in Leibniz, Euler and Cauchy have been interpreted in both a Weierstrassian and Robinson's frameworks. The latter provides closer proxies for the procedures of the classical masters. Thus, Leibniz's…

We contribute to the lively debate in current scholarship on the Leibnizian calculus. In a recent text, Arthur and Rabouin argue that non-Archimedean continua are incompatible with Leibniz's concepts of number, quantity and magnitude. They…

We examine prevailing philosophical and historical views about the origin of infinitesimal mathematics in light of modern infinitesimal theories, and show the works of Fermat, Leibniz, Euler, Cauchy and other giants of infinitesimal…

Cauchy's contribution to the foundations of analysis is often viewed through the lens of developments that occurred some decades later, namely the formalisation of analysis on the basis of the epsilon-delta doctrine in the context of an…

In this paper we offer a reconstruction of the evolution of Leibniz's thought concerning the problem of the infinite divisibility of bodies, the tension between actuality, unassignability and syncategorematicity, and the closely related…

Recent Leibniz scholarship has sought to gauge which foundational framework provides the most successful account of the procedures of the Leibnizian calculus (LC). While many scholars (e.g., Ishiguro, Levey) opt for a default Weierstrassian…

The way Leibniz applied his philosophy to mathematics has been the subject of longstanding debates. A key piece of evidence is his letter to Masson on bodies. We offer an interpretation of this often misunderstood text, dealing with the…

Disagreements that resist rational resolution, often termed ``deep disagreements'', have been the focus of much work in epistemology and informal logic. In this paper, I argue that they also deserve the attention of philosophers of…

We explore the issue of providing a foundational framework for Leibnizian infinitesimals in the light of modern standard and nonstandard approaches. We outline a trichotomy of ordinals, cardinals and ringinals as a historiographic tool. A…

In this paper we study the Cauchy problem for overdetermined systems of linear partial differential operators with constant coefficients in some spaces of $\omega$-ultradifferentiable functions in the sense of Braun, Meise and Taylor, for…

The topic is the history of the concepts of equivalence relation, Cauchy sequence, and metric space. The thesis is that disused definitions of these notions could profitably be revived.

Many historians of the calculus deny significant continuity between infinitesimal calculus of the 17th century and 20th century developments such as Robinson's theory. Robinson's hyperreals, while providing a consistent theory of…

Leibniz used the term fiction in conjunction with infinitesimals. What kind of fictions they were exactly is a subject of scholarly dispute. The position of Bos and Mancosu contrasts with that of Ishiguro and Arthur. Leibniz's own views,…