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Cantor, God, and Inconsistent Multiplicities* Cover
Open Access
|Mar 2016

Abstract

The importance of Georg Cantor’s religious convictions is often neglected in discussions of his mathematics and metaphysics. Herein I argue, pace Jané (1995), that due to the importance of Christianity to Cantor, he would have never thought of absolutely infinite collections/inconsistent multiplicities, as being merely potential, or as being purely mathematical entities. I begin by considering and rejecting two arguments due to Ignacio Jané based on letters to Hilbert and the generating principles for ordinals, respectively, showing that my reading of Cantor is consistent with that evidence. I then argue that evidence from Cantor’s later writings shows that he was still very religious later in his career, and thus would not have given up on the reality of the absolute, as that would imply an imperfection on the part of God.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/slgr-2016-0008 | Journal eISSN: 2199-6059 | Journal ISSN: 0860-150X
Language: English
Page range: 133 - 146
Published on: Mar 17, 2016
Published by: University of Białystok
In partnership with: Paradigm Publishing Services
Publication frequency: 4 issues per year
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© 2016 Aaron R. Thomas-Bolduc, published by University of Białystok
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.