Projects
In his Archeology of Knowledge (1969) Michel Foucault defined the positivity of discourse as that aspect of scientific practice which identifies different "oeuvres" as belonging to a single "discursive formation" and the interpositivity as the configuration of several discursive formations that is "the law of their communications". Generally, the fully developed sciences tend to stress the side of positivity at the expense of interpositivity.
Mathematics is a paradigm case of this phenomenon, because it successfully obscured the metaphysical origins of its most vexing theoretical problems. That is why I intend to explore the interactions between the epistemic frameworks of neo-Kantian philosophy and abstract mathematics in the German academic milieu around the turn of the XX century. The disclosure of these interactions is important, because the philosophical dimensions of mathematical concepts are part of what Foucault called the "unsaid", i.e. the background of the enunciative field of pure mathematics.