Philippine E-Journals

Mathematics and Sublimity

Charles Mccarty

Discipline: Mathematics

 

Abstract:

Philosophers writing on aesthetics in the late 18th Century, including Edmund Burke, Moses Mendelssohn and Immanuel Kant, were aware of a close connection between our appreciation of the sublime and our recognition of the cognitive authority of mathematical reports of counting and measuring. The present article endeavors to describe that connection in contemporary terms and to argue for its importance.