Cantor, God, and Inconsistent Multiplicities*

• Authors: Aaron R. Thomas-Bolduc
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The importance of Georg Cantor’s religious convictions is often neglected in discussions of his mathematics and metaphysics. Herein I argue, pace Jané (1995), that due to the importance of Christianity to Cantor, he would have never thought of absolutely infinite collections/inconsistent multiplicities, as being merely potential, or as being purely mathematical entities. I begin by considering and rejecting two arguments due to Ignacio Jané based on letters to Hilbert and the generating principles for ordinals, respectively, showing that my reading of Cantor is consistent with that evidence. I then argue that evidence from Cantor’s later writings shows that he was still very religious later in his career, and thus would not have given up on the reality of the absolute, as that would imply an imperfection on the part of God.

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Studies in Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric
• Year: 2016
• Volume: 44
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 133-146

Dates

published

2016-03-01

online

2016-03-17

Contributors

author

Aaron R. Thomas-Bolduc

• University of Calgary

References

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Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/slgr-2016-0008