The Provenance of Pure Reason: Essays in the Philosophy of Mathematics and Its History

William Tait is one of the most distinguished philosophers of mathematics of the last fifty years. This volume collects his most important published philosophical papers from the 1980's to the present. The articles cover a wide range of issues in the foundations and philosophy of mathematics, including some on historical figures ranging from Plato to Gödel. Tait's main contributions were initially in proof theory and constructive mathematics, later moving on to more philosophical subjects including finitism and skepticism about mathematics. This collection, presented as a whole, reveals the underlying unity of Tait's work. The volume includes an introduction in which Tait reflects more generally on the evolution of his point of view, as well as an appendix and added endnotes in which he gives some interesting background to the original essays. This is an important collection of the work of one of the most eminent philosophers of mathematics in this generation.