JF Ptak Science Books Post 2432
Unusual marginalia in books is always interesting, especially when it is by the author, or from some official source. This example is a little more unusual in that it appears to a copy sent to assure copyright protection for the work--to me it gives the book a Bartleby-ian sense of place.
Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte wrote The Philosophy of Mathematics, translated from the Cours de Philosophie Positive, which was translated by W.M. Gillespie and published in New York by the not-yet-venerable firm of Harper & Brothers in 1851.
It just strikes me now that the "Bartlbey" reference above (from a Herman Melville short story) is even more appropriate than I thought, because just a few short months later, on November 15, 1851, Harper & Brothers would publish Melville's Moby-Dick--which is a nice piece of serendipity. I could say one other thing--I suspect that in the early stages the Comte might have sold more copies than the Melville.
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This is evidently the U.S. copyright deposit copy, or at least so it seems from the notation on the title page, making it a rather unique copy of a somewhat-significant book in the history of the philosophy of mathematics. Comte (19 January 1798 – 5 September 1857), better known as Auguste Comte, may well be described as being among the first modern philosophers of science, as well as being one of the founders of the field of sociology and the philosophical/logical doctrine of positivism. His book on the philosophy of mathematics is the first of its kind in the modern sense of the study.
Comte defines math as a science and not an art early on in the work:
"TRUE DEFINITION OF MATHEMATICS We are now able to define mathematical science with precision by assigning to it as its object the indirect measurement of magnitudes and by saying it constantly proposes to determine certain magnitudes from others by means of the precise relations existing between them."
"This enunciation instead of giving the idea of only an art as do all the ordinary definitions characterizes immediately a true science and shows it at once to be composed of an immense chain of intellectual operations which may evidently become very complicated because of the series of intermediate links which it will be necessary to establish between the unknown quantities and those which admit of a direct measurement of the number of variables ccexistent in the proposed question and of the nature of the relations between all these different magnitudes furnished by the phenomena under consideration According to such a definition the spirit of mathematics consists in always regarding all the quantities which any phenomenon can present as connected and interwoven with one another with the view of deducing them from one another..."
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