Making a World, Mathematically
This chapter looks at mathematics not only as subject to constraints but also as feeding back into the reality that shapes it. To show how mathematics changes the reality in which it evolves and reforms the world where it lives, the chapter follows three nineteenth-century post-Kantian German thinkers: Johann G. Fichte, Friedrich W.J. Schelling, and Hermann Cohen. It also offers a solution to Mark Steiner's formulation of Eugene Wigner's problem of the “unreasonable” applicability of mathematics to the natural sciences (or at least a reduction of the problem to a more containable intra-mathematical setting). It lends credence to the book's description of mathematical practice as a negotiation of various constraints by means of rearticulated, superposed, and deferred interpretations in a contemplated and experienced reality.