ABSTRACT

This chapter presents a literal version of the summary drawn up for the posthumous first edition in 1851. The Paradoxien are the work of Bolzano's old age. The version is translated from the 1851 Leipzig edition, is a posthumous one by a friend with whom Bernard Bolzano discussed the topics in question for the last few years of his life. The competence of Prihonsky as an editor of mathematical matter and the trustworthiness of the received version of the Paradoxien have recently been placed in doubt by M. Jasek, the discoverer of the counter-example. The antecedents of the Paradoxien go back at least as far as 9 June 1842, when Bolzano read 'that part of his paper on the march of ideas to be followed in a truly scientific exposition of mathematics which deals with the finite and infinite'.