Nika Pona
(ILLC)
What is wrong with Marxist philosophy of mathematics?
May 16th at 17:30, in ILLC Seminar Room (F1.15)
Jean Van Heijenoort is mostly known as the editor of an important volume “From Frege to Godel: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic” and... as a Trotskyist activist. Rarely his name gets mentioned without the follow-up joke: “Heijenoort stopped being leftist after he read what Marx wrote on mathematics”. In fact, he did publish a paper with very strong criticism of Marxist philosophy of mathematics in 1948, the year he publicly renounced Marxism. So, maybe it isn't a joke after all. During my presentation I will discuss this paper and explain what it so wrong about Marxist philosophy of mathematics.