Date
Tue February 14th 2017, 4:30pm
Location
Building 240, Room 101
Logic of Relations and Diagrammatic reasoning: Structuralist elements in the work of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914).
The talk presents aspects of the work of Charles Sanders Peirce illustrating that he adhered to a number of the pre-structuralist themes. We shall present some of his contributions to mathematics as well as philosophy in order to show that relations occupied a privileged role. When writing about results in mathematics he often uses the phrase that they are based on his 'logic of relatives', and he refers to the reasoning of mathematics as 'diagrammatic reasoning'. Besides pointing to structural themes in Peirce's work much of this exposition will be devoted to explaining what is meant by these two phrases.