ABSTRACT
In its history of over two thousand years, mathematics has seldom been disturbed by philosophical disputes. Ever since Plato, who is said to have put the slogan ‘Let no one who is not a geometer enter here’ over the door of his academy, mathematics has been the standard of exact truth against which other philosophical discourse is measured. Descartes’ Discourse on Method grew out of his Geometry. Spinoza wrote his Ethics in the style of Euclid’s Elements. And Leibniz dreamed of a Characteristica Universalis by means of which ‘we should be able to reason in metaphysics and morals in much the same way as in geometry and analysis’.
