On Nelson’s Position Concerning the Philosophy of Mathematics (1928)

Subsequent to the preceding article by Otto Meyerhof some words on Nelson’s significance for the philosophy of mathematics should be said. Nelson belonged to those philosophers whose way of thinking resulted from a familiarity with the spirit of exact sciences. For him, mathematics and theoretical physics formed the model he tried to follow in elaborating his philosophical thoughts. He found the demands of rigorous systematics perfectly fulfilled in mathematical axiomatics, especially in that form Hilbert had given to it in his “Grundlagen der Geometrie”. And therefore it was his endeavor to conquer a new field for this method of axiomatics in the domain of philosophy. In doing so Nelson stood far away from that unfruitful way of imitating mathematics which was dominant in the pre-Kantian metaphysics, based