ABSTRACT
Absolutist philosophies are committed to a belief in the absolute objectivity and neutrality of mathematics, as are a range of personal philosophies of mathematics. However, despite this belief, the view of mathematics they promote is itself value-laden. For, as we have seen, within mathematics there are implicit values. Abstract is valued over concrete, formal over informal, objective over subjective, justification over discovery, rationality over intuition, reason over emotion, general over particular, theory over practice, the work of the brain over the work of the hand, and so on. These constitute many of the overt values of mathematicians, as well as being shared by much of British and Western scientific culture.
