The Epicurean Critique of Mathematics

I just received this link and have not had a chance to read it but the topic seems fascinating (“The Epicurean Critique of Mathematics”) and it comes to us through our friends in Greece. Please read and comment when you can either at EpicureanFriends or at the Facebook group! http://scholarship.claremont.edu/jhm/vol7/iss2/9/

Update:  There’s a lot of good information in this article that will be helpful for anyone who wants to read up on the subject.  However after finishing it I am sorry to conclude that it doesn’t ultimately seem to appreciate the Epicurean position as reflected by what one of our group members posted – ” The map is not the territory, regardless of how useful or up-to-date it is.”

So to save people some effort, here’s the concluding paragraph, and based on it they can decide how much time they’d like to invest:

“The Epicureans, in general, did not have mathematics among their primary philosophical interests. That, of course, excludes the more mathematically inclined Epicureans such as Zeno. Yet, their belief that all knowledge is empirical and the inductive logic that guided their philosophy [21] do not seem to align with some of the most important aspects of mathematics, such as abstraction, axiomatic method and proof. Perhaps, the Epicureans could be justified in a way, as neither science nor mathematics were as advanced then as today, and they did not have a complete picture. It is possible that, today, they could have seen mathematics in a quite different way and recognized some of its special aspects.”