Years Ago David E.

Rowe, Editor

Brouwer’s Editor’s Note: Brouwer

as Philosopher and Critic
intuitionism.’’ Still, Brouwer’s creative
vision was, from the start, fundamentally
geometrical and, as a topologist, the con-

Intuitionism Within the last two decades there has

been considerable interest in the life
Vis à Vis
and work of L. E. J. Brouwer, one of
the twentieth century’s most colorful
and controversial figures (Stigt 1990;
tinuum remained his natural domain of
inquiry. Thus, viewed in larger terms,
the thrust of his intuitionist program
should be seen as standing in firm
opposition to the longstanding trend

Kant’s Dalen 1999, 2005; Kuiper 2004). Brou-

wer’s name has long been associated
with two spheres of activity. As a
associated with the ‘‘arithmetization of
analysis.’’
Already in the early 1870s, much
Intuition and pioneering actor in topology, he pub-
lished a series of papers between 1909
effort had been expended on freeing
the real numbers from all vestiges of

Imagination and 1913 that were to exert a major

BERNARD FREYDBERG
Send submissions to David E. Rowe,
Fachbereich 08, Institut für Mathematik,
Johannes Gutenberg University,
D-55099 Mainz, Germany.
e-mail: rowe@mathematik.uni-mainz.de
impact on this fledgling field of
research. Two famous results from this
period were his proof of the invari-
ance of dimension and his elegant
fixed-point theorem, both of which
were nonconstructive in nature (these
results can be found in the classic text
of Hurewicz and Wallman 1948). Soon
afterward, however, Brouwer began an
earnest program for a truly constructive
mathematics. He took up a critical
analysis of set theory and the concept
of the continuum, activities that led him
to pursue a radically new research
orientation that came to be known as
intuitionism. With it Brouwer aimed to
sweep away standard methods that had
long been used for proving existence
theorems in analysis, techniques which
had become increasingly controversial
in the wake of the new foundational
research undertaken by Cantor, Hilbert,
Zermelo, Schoenflies and others.
It has been customary to cordon
off these two spheres of Brouwer’s
activity: His fertile contributions to
mainstream topology from his early
career and the later (in many ways
less successful) work on intuitionist
foundations that made him such a con-
troversial figure. This division was
adopted, for example, by the editors of
his Collected Works (Brouwer 1975,
1976). Moreover, Brouwer’s biography
would seem to justify this separation,
as he himself described his turn to
foundations circa 1914 with the dra-
matic phrase ‘‘the second act of
‘‘geometrical intuition.’’ For Weier-
strass, Cantor and Dedekind, the real
number system was a purely arith-
metical construct, whereas Kronecker
spoke out vociferously against this con-
ception. By 1900, Hilbert famously pro-
claimed that Kronecker had been dead
wrong; Hilbert maintained that the very
existence of the ‘‘arithmetized contin-
uum’’ could be proved, once and for
all, by demonstrating the consistency
of his axioms for a complete ordered
Archimedean field. The algebraist
Kronecker could only turn over in his
grave, but the topologist Brouwer
mounted a strong counterattack. Thus,
behind Brouwer’s intuitionism stood
his fierce opposition to the general
notion that the continuum could be
reduced to an arithmetical object; for
him the intuitive continuum was far
richer than Dedekind’s or Cantor’s
atomistic conceptions of an infinite
point set whose individual elements
were captured in their entirety by
means of arithmetical properties alone.
He was also steadfastly opposed to
Hilbert’s formalist methods. Brouwer
was ferociously committed to his vision
and knew full well that this placed
him on a collision course with Hilbert,
the most influential mathematician of
the era. His intuitionist conception of
the continuum aimed at nothing less
than overturning Hilbert’s formalized
axiomatic methods, an approach Brou-
wer regarded as contentless.
Brouwer’s intuitionist ideas gained
widespread currency after the First

28 THE MATHEMATICAL INTELLIGENCER
2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

World War, especially after 1921 when
Hermann Weyl published his essay on
the ‘‘New Foundations Crisis in Math-
ematics.’’ In it, Weyl explicitly cast
aside his own earlier attempt to rebuild
the continuum on the basis of a refined
set theory, noting as he did so that he
had never conceived of his ‘‘Weylean
number system’’ as identical with the’’
intuitively given continuum.’’ Weyl’s
provocative text, strongly colored by
the political events of the era, was
openly partisan:
So I now abandon my own attempt
and join Brouwer. I tried to find solid
ground in the impending dissolution
of the State of Analysis (which is in
preparation, even though still only
recognized by few) without forsaking
the order upon which it is founded,
by carrying out its fundamental prin-
ciple purely and honestly. And I
believe I was successful—as far as this
is possible. For this order is in itself
untenable, as I have now convinced
myself, and Brouwer—that is the
revolution! . . . It is Brouwer to whom
we owe the new solution of the
continuum problem. (Weyl 1921, pp.
98–99)
Not to be outdone, Hilbert took up
Weyl’s political metaphor and defen-
ded the State of Analysis:
What Weyl and Brouwer do amounts
in principle to following the erstwhile
path of Kronecker: They seek to
ground mathematics by throw-
ing overboard all phenomena that
make them uneasy by establishing a
dictatorship of prohibitions à la Kro-
necker. But this means to dismember
and mutilate our science, and if we
follow such reformers, we run the
danger of losing a large number of
our most valuable treasures. . . . I
believe that, just as Kronecker in his
day was unable to get rid of the irra-
tional numbers (Weyl and Brouwer,
incidentally, allow the preservation of
a torso) so today Weyl and Brouwer
will be unable to push their program
through. No: Brouwer is not, as Weyl
believes, the revolution, but only a
repetition, with the old tools, of an
attempted coup that, in its day, was
undertaken with more dash, but
nevertheless failed completely; and
now that the power of the state has
been armed and strengthened by
Frege, Dedekind, and Cantor, this
coup is doomed to fail. (Hilbert 1922,
p. 200)
Six years later, Brouwer was pushing
his ideas harder than ever, prompting
Hilbert to resort to more mundane
power politics. This conflict culminated
in 1928 when Hilbert, despite strong
misgivings within his own camp of loy-
alists, ousted Brouwer from the editorial
board of Mathematische Annalen (Da-
len 1990) Soon thereafter, Brouwer
largely withdrew from the arena of active
research; while continuing to dabble
with foundations issues, he failed to
complete any of the three drafts he made
for a monograph on intuitionist mathe-
matics (Stigt 1990). Needless to say,
Hilbert and Brouwer never reconciled
after this dramatic rupture.
The 1920s represented the ideologi-
cal phase in the foundations debates;
after Brouwer retired from the scene,
the polemical language died down
quickly. Perhaps not coincidentally, in
1930 leading representatives of the
three leading ‘‘philosophical schools’’
convened at a conference in Königs-
berg that was devoid of the customary
fireworks. Rudolf Carnap spoke on
behalf of logicism, John von Neumann
represented formalism, whereas Arend
Heyting served as spokesman for intu-
itionism. In the meantime, Heyting
had given a formalization of intuition-
ist logic, a development Brouwer had
approved, albeit with the understand-
ing that this formal language contained
nothing new or even important for
intuitionist mathematics. At any rate,
this conference successfully canonized
the three approaches that would for the
next several decades come to dominate
discussions in the philosophy of math-
ematics. It was thus both fitting and
ironic that a diminutive young logician
slipped into the conference hall to make
an announcement of a new result about
formal systems, one that apparently
only von Neumann grasped at the time.
His name was Kurt Gödel, and the result
was the first of his two famous incom-
pleteness theorems. Soon thereafter,
Hilbert’s program for establishing the
consistency of the axioms of arithmetic
for the natural numbers (his first step
toward salvaging the continuum) was in
a shambles.
It has been customary to look back
on the battle between Brouwer and
Hilbert from the vantage point of

2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, Volume 31, Number 4, 2009
subsequent events: Gödel’s theorems,
Heyting’s intuitionist logic, and Paul
Bernays’s subsequent work on formal
systems and the axiomatization of set
theory. Yet these developments tell
us relatively little about the ideas
that originally motivated the principal
actors. To understand these, one must
go back in time to recall Hilbert’s
encounters with figures like Kronecker
and Paul Gordan (Rowe 2003b, 2005),
his use of formal axiomatics to ‘‘arithm-
etize geometry,’’ and his insistence on
using the axiomatic method to refute
Kronecker’s skepticism regarding the
ontological status of the continuum as
an arithmetical object. Hilbert’s views
were already made highly visible in
his famous Paris lecture on ‘‘Mathemat-
ical Problems’’ from 1900, an address
that profoundly influenced the young
Brouwer. But unlike Hilbert, Brouwer
was deeply engaged in the broader
philosophical discourse of the times,
and so he quietly distanced himself
from the buoyant optimism that Hilbert
had made his own. When Hilbert pro-
nounced that there is no ignorabimus in
mathematics—that each and every well-
formulated mathematical problem can
either be solved or not, hence its truth
value was certain—Brouwer saw this as
unwarranted hubris. Indeed, he identi-
fied this claim with a fundamental
methodological weakness that would
later become a cornerstone of his intu-
itionist philosophy: The fallacy of
assuming the unrestricted validity of the
logical tertium non datur, the Law of
the Excluded Middle.
Brouwer, probably more than any
other contemporary mathematician,
tried to weld his mathematics to fit
deeply held philosophical views. This
alone helps to explain the strong
attraction he had for Hermann Weyl,
a mathematician with similar philo-
sophical sensibilities (Rowe 2003a). For
Brouwer, the pursuit and attainment of
mathematical knowledge had to be
understood in human terms and not
by appealing to some transcendental
sphere of eternal, never-changing har-
monies. Mathematics is thus created in
time, a notion that already played a key
part in the epistemology of Immanuel
Kant. Experts on Brouwer’s thought
have long noted the role of Kant’s
ideas in his writings (Stigt 1990, 127-
129), especially in connection with
29
Brouwer’s primordial conception of
time. Nevertheless, the last word on this
topic has surely yet to be spoken.
In the essay that follows, the philos-
opher Bernard Freydberg offers a new
assessment of the intellectual affinities
between Brouwer’s philosophy of
mathematics and the epistemology of
Kant. This reading derives in part
from Freydberg’s original analysis of
the role of productive imagination in
Kant’s philosophy (for which the reader
should consult Freydberg 1994, 2005).
His findings lead to a very different
interpretation of Brouwer’s intuitionism
hat follows is an apodeixis in
W the original Platonic sense as
opposed to modern or con-
temporary philosophical usage. Kant
used the word apodiktisch to mean
‘‘absolutely certain’’ or ‘‘incontrovert-
ible.’’ So, too, did a philosopher who
was at the center of the early twentieth-
century discussions of the foundations
of mathematics, Edmund Husserl. This
meaning has become the lexicographi-
cally respectable one, to the degree that
its earlier Platonic sense has been all but
completely obscured. This more origi-
nal sense, in fact, carries a very different
connotation, drawing on the literal
Greek meaning as ‘‘showing forth’’:
deiksis from deiknumi—to show, apo =
forth, from. In Euclid’s Elements the
apodeixis constitutes the actual proof,
being the fifth among six steps in the
formal enunciation of a proposition.
In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates applies
the word apodeixis to the great myth of
Eros that comprises the heart of the
dialogue. The myth speaks of the
immortality of the soul and of the soul’s
repeated journeys. It speaks of the
worthy human soul ascending to where
it can get a glimpse of the procession of
the gods and of the divine banquet,
where the divinities—standing on the
earth’s outer crust—feast on ‘‘being be-
ingly being.’’ It speaks of beauty as
providing the recollection of this vision,
and of love of beauty as the way
humanity most fully realizes itself on
1
A recent study that deals with this theme is Kuiper 2004.
30 THE MATHEMATICAL INTELLIGENCER
than current views of this philosophy
which have been strongly colored by
subsequent developments in intuition-
istic logic. Freydberg’s reading offers a
view of Brouwer’s thought that suggests
there was no radical break that led to
intuitionism, and that it is a mistake to
separate Brouwer’s early career as a
topologist from his endeavors to reform
set theory and the foundations of anal-
ysis. Rather, following this account,
Brouwer’s intellectual journey, culmi-
nating with the ‘‘second act of intui-
tionism,’’ was guided by a coherent
vision that he held already from his
earth. Most provocative are the words
spoken by Socrates immediately before
beginning this remarkable apodeixis:
‘‘The apodeixis [often translated as
‘‘proof’’] shall be one that the wise will
trust, but the clever will disbelieve.’’
(Plato 2003, 245 b.c.)
I risk an analogous claim for this
apodeixis of the Brouwer-Kant rela-
tionship. The connection between
Brouwer’s intuitionism and Kantian
philosophy is on some level certainly
plain, and there is no doubt that Brou-
wer read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
(Stigt 1990, 127–132). However, he
was certainly not a Kant scholar. More-
over, it would be a mistake (and would
undoubtedly overstate the case) to claim
that Kant influenced him. Rather,
Brouwer found a kindred spirit in Kant;
one might better think of Kant as his
dialogical partner, a fellow member of
Schopenhauer’s ‘‘Republic of Geniuses’’
who speak to one another from moun-
tain peaks across centuries. There is little
or no evidence that Brouwer read any-
thing beyond Kant’s first critique and, as
I will suggest from the evidence, his
most attentive and conscientious read-
ing of the first critique seemed to be
concentrated upon one section alone,
albeit a crucial one. But like many eager
tellers of tales, I have gotten a bit ahead
of myself. First, a few words about the
remarkable philosophical inclinations
of Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer (1881–
1966) are surely in order.
student days. As Freydberg argues, the
thrust of Brouwer’s thought resonated
on a deep level with Kantian motifs, a
conclusion that coincidentally shatters
another standard picture long associ-
ated with Hilbert’s philosophical views.
For the ironic upshot of the analysis
below is that it was not Hilbert—the
native of Kant’s Königsberg who cited
the famous philosopher approvingly on
numerous occasions—but rather his
arch-nemesis, Brouwer, who carried
the torch of Kantian philosophy for-
ward among mathematicians a century
ago. D.E.R.
Brouwer’s Philosophical
Outlook
Although several of Brouwer’s works
have been absorbed into the mathe-
matical mainstream, his larger philo-
sophical outlook has received rather
little detailed attention.1 Furthermore,
much of that attention has been dis-
missive, and one can easily understand
why. In his early work, Life, Art, and
Mysticism (Brouwer 1996), written
when he was 24, Brouwer argued that
both science and the human intellect
are sources of sin and evil. Pessimism,
misanthropy and arrogance set the
dominant tone. His otherwise admiring
chronicler, Dirk van Dalen, apparently
found this work at least somewhat
embarrassing (Dalen 1999, pp. 66–77).
However, his other major biographer,
W. J. van Stigt, emphasized that much
in this radical philosophical tract
foreshadowed his future work in mathe-
matics. Van Stigt also noted the signifi-
cant historical fact that Brouwer not only
never disowned this work but actu-
ally affirmed it throughout his life. ‘‘It
proudly features in every one of his
entries for various biographical dictio-
naries as the first of his two books’’ (Stigt
1990, p. 35). One can understand why
this is so as well. For in Life, Art, and
Mysticism, Brouwer asserts an underly-
ing belief in a natural—intuitive—
access to reality that antedates the
intrusion of these ‘‘evils,’’ a view that he
not only never gave up, but that

Figure 1. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was baptized Emanuel, but changed the
spelling of his name after learning Hebrew.
informed many of his singular mathe-
matical insights.
Brouwer’s philosophical thought was
unsystematic, and he disdained the
mundane practice of offering arguments
for his views. Taking his ideas out of
context, they may appear merely bizarre
and irrational, providing easy prey for
critics. This does not mean, however,
that his thought contains little of value,
nor does it lack inner consistency and
cogency. One who is trained in the his-
tory of philosophy can surely find
echoes of thinkers from Heraclitus to
2
(Stigt 1990, p. 96). Brouwer’s later description of the Second Act of Intuitionism in his Cambridge lectures is more revealing: Admitting two ways of creating new
mathematical entities: Firstly in the shape of more or less freely proceeding infinite sequences of mathematical entities previously acquired (so that, for decimal fractions
having neither exact values, not any guarantee of ever getting exact values admitted); secondly in the shape of mathematical species, i. e., properties supposable for
mathematical entities previously acquired, satisfying the condition that if they hold for a certain mathematical entity, they also hold for all mathematical entities which
have been defined to be ’equal’ to it, definitions of equality having to satisfy the conditions of symmetry, reflexivity and transitivity… (Dalen 1981, p. 8).
Merleau-Ponty. Perhaps an intrepid
philosopher will one day write a com-
mentary that plumbs the depths of
Brouwer’s thought and presents a uni-
fied account of it. However, the
Brouwer-Kant affinity with respect to the
history of mathematics is the concern
here, and those insights of Brouwer most
under consideration are the following:
1) The First Act of Intuitionism
In several of his later lectures, Brouwer
described the historical evolution of his
thought, culminating in what he called

2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, Volume 31, Number 4, 2009
its first and second acts of intuitionism.
These rested on two insights, the first of
which he had already reached as a stu-
dent, namely ‘‘the uncompromising
separation of mathematics from math-
ematical language and thereby from the
linguistic phenomena as described by
theoretical logic’’ (unpublished Berlin
lectures, 1927, quoted in Stigt 1990,
p. 96). Brouwer’s second insight came
around 1916 and led him to his notion of
free-choice sequences, the key to his
understanding of the continuum (see
Stigt 1990, pp. 71–77). In his Berlin lec-
tures, this second act of intuitionism was
described as ‘‘a form of self-unfolding of
the Primordial Intuition’’ that allowed
not only for lawlike sequences but also
those that were freely chosen, yet sub-
ject to certain constructive restrictions.2
These latter constructs were notoriously
complicated, but luckily we need not be
concerned with them for present pur-
poses, as we are only concerned with
Brouwer’s first act of intuitionism,
which he characterized as follows in his
postwar Cambridge lectures:
Completely separating mathematics
from mathematical language and
hence from the phenomena of lan-
guage described by theoretical logic,
recognizing that intuitionistic math-
ematics is an essentially languageless
activity of the mind having its origin
in the perception of a move of time.
This perception of a move of time
may be described as the falling apart
of a life moment into two distinct
things, one of which gives way to the
other, but is retained by memory. If
the twoity thus born is divested of all
quality, it passes into the empty form
of the common substratum of all
twoities.
And it is this common substratum,
this empty form, which is the basic
intuition of mathematics (Dalen
1981, p. 7).
2) Rejection of the Principle
of Excluded Middle
From early on Brouwer denied the
legitimacy of applying Aristotle’s
31

Figure 2. L. E. J. Brouwer lecturing on a favorite topic: The intuitionistic continuum.
tertium non datur to propositions that
concern infinite sets or infinitely many
possibilities. He also came to iden-
tify the notion that this principle was
universally applicable with Hilbert’s
sweeping claim that every well-posed
problem in mathematics has a solu-
tion, that in the realm of mathematical
knowledge there can be no igno-
rabimus. This article of faith was
propounded by Hilbert in his famous
Paris lecture on ‘‘Mathematical Prob-
lems,’’ delivered in 1900; Brouwer
referred to it as ‘‘Hilbert’s dogma.’’ For
him, all human knowledge was his-
torically conditioned and subject to
change. Thus, the faulty belief in the
universal validity of the principle of the
excluded third was a phenomenon of
the history of civilization; Brouwer
likened it with the former belief in the
rationality of p, or in the rotation of the
firmament around the earth.
3) On the Nature of Mathematical
Knowledge
Brouwer once wrote that ‘‘properly
speaking the building of intuitive
mathematics per se is an action
32 THE MATHEMATICAL INTELLIGENCER
[een daad]… and not a science (een
theorie),’’ a remark that Dirk van Dalen
compared with Hermann Weyl’s later
dictum: ‘‘Mathematics is more an action
than a theory [mehr ein Tun als eine
Lehre]’’ (Dalen 1999, p. 105). Calling
mathematics more an action than a sci-
ence requires that Brouwer give some
account of what belongs to mathemati-
cal truth. He seems, at one point, to
restrict not only mathematical truth
but all truth to an entirely subjective
criterion:
For the only truth for me is my own
ego [ikheid] of this moment, sur-
rounded by a wealth of images in
which the ego believes and which
make the ego live. There is no sense
in the question whether those ima-
ges are ‘true,’ for my ego only the
images exist and are real as such; a
second corresponding reality, inde-
pendent of my ego, is out of the
question (cited in Dalen 1978, p.
293).
However, when he speaks of math-
ematical truth more specifically, a
merely subjective criterion is clearly
insufficient:
Finally it must be remarked that the
intention of the work under discus-
sion is not to propose considerations
under which different persons can
establish different conclusions, but
to establish truths that…anybody
who has once understood them will
forever affirm (cited in Dalen 1978,
p. 31).
These passages suggest an integrated
picture of the nature of mathematical
knowledge: Mathematics is an act of the
human mind, which fashions the ima-
ges surrounding it into particular
patterns that, once understood, have
universal validity.
Brouwer’s Kantian Affinity
I will now consider the three topics
listed in the previous section serially.
1) The First Act of Intuitionism: It is
not difficult to locate certain textual
connections between Brouwer and
Kant, especially between the First Act of
Intuitionism and Kant’s Transcendental
Aesthetic in the Critique of Pure Reason,
the section that deals with space and
time as pure intuitions. However, the
nature of the connection is not alto-
gether straightforward. First of all, there
is a conundrum in Kant’s notion of pure
intuition. At the outset, Kant claims that
for us humans, intuition—sensation in
general—must be given. They are dis-
tinguished from concepts, which must
be thought. In the same paragraph, he
also claims that in order for a represen-
tation to be pure, it must have no
empirical (given) content (Kant 2003).
Therefore, at the very least there is a
tension in the notion of pure intuition.
Decades ago I took a graduate seminar
with the great American Kant scholar
Lewis White Beck, who rejected the
notion of ‘‘pure intuition’’ and actually
had us substitute ‘‘pure form of intui-
tion’’ whenever the formulation ‘‘pure
intuition’’ occurred. This phrase meant
merely the pure element in every
(empirical) intuition. I have since come
to have serious doubts about Beck’s
interpretation, and here I can attempt
to shed some light upon Brouwer’s
powerfully creative affinity for Kantian
thought.
Pure intuition: What does it mean?
‘‘Pure,’’ as we have seen, means ‘‘inde-
pendent of sensation.’’ Human intuition,
as we have also seen, must be given.
Taking the two together, we can make
sense of them only if we interpret
pure intuition as intuition that we give
ourselves. Here, in The First Act of Intui-
tionism, Brouwer instinctively under-
stood Kant’s point, namely that pure
intuition—more specifically, time as the
form of all intuition—is essentially non-
conceptual, that is, nonlinguistic (for
Brouwer, there is no pure intuition of
space). One can say preliminarily that
language limps along afterwards, that
the function of language is second-order
and secondary. The function of lan-
guage—mathematical language and
any other—is to serve the intuition, to
point to the intuition that resides at
a more fundamental level than any
language.
Consider the very first sentence of
the Transcendental Aesthetic, which
reads: ‘‘In whatever manner and by
whatever means a mode of knowledge
[Erkenntnisse] may relate to objects,
intuition is that through which it is in
immediate relation to them, and to
which all thought as a means is direc-
ted’’ (Kant 2003, pp. A19, B33). Thought
(language) is in service to intuition.
Though the need humans have for lan-
guage cannot (and, of course, should
not) be denied, there is no doubt that for
Kant intuition is primary. Brouwer’s
claim that mathematics has lost its way
because it has confounded itself with
mathematical language echoes loudly
from the Kantian analysis that I have just
proposed.
However, many critics have noted
what they see as a disconnect, or per-
haps even a contradiction, in Brouwer’s
philosophy of mathematics with respect
to language and the role of logical
notation. After all, Brouwer employs
both in order to formulate intuitionist
mathematics. I might add that it is
indeed insufficient merely to assert
the nonlinguistic character of intuition
based upon its separability in reflection
from language. Much more is required
to account for this apparent paradox. I
suggest strongly that other texts from
the Critique of Pure Reason amply
supply this account, although Brouwer
does not refer to them and may indeed
have breezed past them.
With the preparation in place, I can
explore a deeper connection between
the Kantian philosophy and Brouwer’s
intuitionism. In my view, the crux of
this connection is not located in the
‘‘Transcendental Aesthetic’’ but in the
‘‘Transcendental Analytic.’’ There, one
must come to terms with a Kantian ele-
ment that, to my knowledge, Brouwer
never mentions: Productive imagina-
tion. I will argue that Kant’s productive
imagination and matters connected with
it—according to a particular interpreta-
tion which, in my view, is governed by a
rigorous textual reading—tacitly un-
dergirds The First Act of Intuitionism
and, a fortiori, all that follows from it.
Early in the ‘‘Transcendental Analytic,’’
Kant writes:
Synthesis in general (überhaupt), as
we shall hereafter see, is the mere
result (Wirkung) of the power of
imagination (Einbildungskraft), a
blind but indispensible function of
the soul, without which we should
have no knowledge whatsoever, but
of which we are scarcely ever con-
scious. To bring this synthesis to
concepts is the sole function of the
understanding, and it is through this
function that we first gain knowl-
edge properly so called. (Kant
2003 pp. A78, B103)
How can the Brouwerian twoity be
seen in light of productive imagination?
The synthesizing work of imagination
is sharply separated from the under-
standing’s work of bringing the synthe-
sis to concepts. Synthesis, an apparently
technical word, also has a literal Greek
meaning: Placing together. For Kant,
synthesis is defined as the act of running
through (a manifold of possibilities) and
holding it together. Productive imagi-
nation, of which Brouwerian ‘‘memory’’
can be considered an implicit offshoot,
holds together the two moments of time.
Time, the pure form of all intuition, is
successive by nature, and a twoity is the
succession of two moments emptied of
whatever content these moments might
contain.
A biographical-historical note that
deserves attention here: Brouwer’s
unorthodoxy was clear early on, so he
had difficulty finding someone to direct
his dissertation. D. J. Korteweg, though
an applied mathematician, was very
open-minded and agreed to serve as
Brouwer’s Ph.D. advisor. Both of Brou-
wer’s biographers note that this led to
some lively exchanges, like this one:

2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, Volume 31, Number 4, 2009
Korteweg: Can one mention the
name of Kant in a mathematical
article?
Brouwer: Yes, Russell and Couturat
did so, and the subject forces me to
do so.
Korteweg: did you study Kant suffi-
ciently enough to form an opinion?
Brouwer: I cannot prove that I did,
but I have repeatedly and seriously
studied the passages I need (Stigt
1990, p. 128).
Brouwer goes on to beg Korteweg
for the understanding of his basic ideas,
but concludes his plea with these less
than humble words: ‘‘[E]ven though you
find [my thoughts] absurd, [this is]
because I am a child of another time
than you are’’ (ibid). So much for grati-
tude for Korteweg’s willingness to direct
a dissertation that was outside his field;
more than once, he had to put up with
Brouwer’s arrogance and inelegant
social skills. But gratitude and social tact,
while admirable qualities, have no rel-
evance for judging philosophical and
mathematical excellence, as Brouwer
surely knew. He did indeed belong to a
generation of mathematicians who
would criticize conventional wisdom
while raising new questions about the
foundations of mathematical research.
2) Rejection of the Principle of
Excluded Middle: The tertium non
datur had been considered funda-
mental to philosophy since Aristotle,
who was credited with first formulating
it. Kant certainly knew Aristotle’s logic,
and he believed that Aristotle had
essentially completed the subject.
However, though he wrote and lec-
tured a great deal on logic, to my
knowledge Kant never mentioned the
Principle of the Excluded Middle or
any of its equivalents. Not only is it
absent in the Critique of Pure Reason,
where one might expect to find it, but
it never appears in his many lecture
courses on logic. This absence is
striking: A theological analogy might
be to imagine a rabbi or priest failing to
mention the creation of light among
God’s works at the outset of the Old
Testament. One might certainly con-
jecture that in his reading of the
Critique of Pure Reason, the young
Brouwer took notice of and perhaps
heart in the absence of this so-called
‘‘fundamental’’ principle.
33
 A brief consideration of Kant’s
Mathematical Antinomies of Pure Rea-
son should be enough to illustrate
Brouwer’s affinity with the Kantian
‘‘absence:’’
First Antinomy
Thesis: The world has a beginning in
time, and is also limited as regards
space.
Antithesis: The world has no begin-
ning, and no limits in space; it is
infinite as regards both time and space
(Kant, 2003 A426–427, B454–455).
Second Antinomy
Thesis: Every composite substance in
the world is made up of simple parts,
and nothing anywhere exists save the
simple or what is composed of the
simple.
Antithesis: No composite thing in the
world is made up of simple parts, and
there nowhere exists in the world
anything simple (Kant, 2003 pp. A434–
435, B 462–463).
In the late eighteenth century, only
Aristotelian logic was available, accord-
ing to which each term in a proposition
was assumed to have members, or
existential import.3 However, for Kant,
‘‘world’’ is a concept of the uncondi-
tioned, that is, it is an idea of reason that
transgresses the sensible condition to
which all concepts are bound if they are
to have meaning and significance—or in
other words, world is a concept with no
object—‘‘world’’ does not exist. As it is
independent of time (Brouwer’s lan-
guage), ‘‘world’’ cannot belong to any
life moment—a notion that is crucial to
his First Act of Intuitionism, as we have
seen. Since the concept ‘‘world’’ refers to
nothing at all, all propositions that
predicate some quality to it are false.
Thus, the theses of both the First and
Second Antinomies, the mathematical
antinomies, are false. According to the
Principle of the Excluded Middle, their
antitheses must be true. However, the
antitheses are both also false for the
same reason that the theses are false:
They predicate some quality to ‘‘world’’!
According to the Principle of the Exclu-
ded Middle, p _ *p; if *p is false, then
3
In Boolean logic, where there is no such requirement, there would be a middle, but this does not affect the issue.
34 THE MATHEMATICAL INTELLIGENCER
p must be true. Therefore, the Logical
Law of Excluded Middle does not hold
in these important cases. One can sur-
mise that in his reading of the Critique of
Pure Reason, the young Brouwer would
have grasped these key arguments, and
it seems likely that he later took heart in
the absence in Kant’s philosophy of this
so-called ‘‘fundamental’’ principle.
Simmering beneath the surface of
Kant’s analysis, one can discern both the
development of certain kinds of philo-
sophical positivism and of Boolean
logic. But both he and Brouwer resisted
these tendencies. On the other hand,
Kant does pay much attention to the
principle of contradiction, which is
merely a principle of formal (i.e., ana-
lytic) logic—according to which any
proposition in which the predicate
contradicts the subject must be false. It is
a conditio sine qua non of truth, a nec-
essary condition, but emphatically not a
sufficient condition. There is another
philosophical antecedent of the Princi-
ple of Contradiction, which Brouwer
accepts. It is found in Plato’s Republic,
and in a manner most suitable to Brou-
wer because of its connection to time: ‘‘It
is obvious that the same thing will not be
willing to do or undergo opposites in the
same part of itself, in relation to the same
thing, at the same time.’’ (Plato 1968, p.
436b, emphasis mine).
I might mention also that for Kant, the
real logic—what might be called his
positive and original logic—is Tran-
scendental Logic, which includes a
relation to time and the movement that
time implies. Formal logic merely
abstracts from transcendental logic,
leaving behind time and the movement
that time implies—elements that also
belong to what Brouwer called ‘‘life
moments.’’
3) On the Nature of Mathematical
Knowledge: The affinity on this matter
is clear in this essential respect: Math-
ematics, for Brouwer as for Kant, is an
act of construction. The difference,
accidental in this context in light of
Brouwer’s study of Kant’s Transcen-
dental Aesthetic, is that, for Brouwer,
mathematics is more art than science,
while it is science alone for Kant, who
sought to establish philosophy as an
a priori science and to include math-
ematics under its sway. Philosophical
knowledge is knowledge by means of
concepts; mathematical knowledge is
knowledge by means of the construc-
tion of concepts. In geometry, his most
often used example, the concept ‘‘tri-
angle’’ serves as a rule for its exhibi-
tion in time and space. Of course, the
drawn triangle upon which proofs are
performed is not the Euclidean trian-
gle, properly speaking. However, the
Euclidean triangle is plainly intended
and the proofs issuing from its use are
incontrovertible.
For Brouwer, mathematics is also a
free creation of the human mind, but it is
art more than science. From his early
philosophical discourses in Life, Art,
and Mysticism, Brouwer expressly
exempted certain kinds of art from the
stigma of sinfulness to which he con-
signed science. Such art, which tran-
scends individuality and history, can
provide ‘‘eruptions of truth’’ that are
sensed but not articulated. Accordingly,
the Brouwerian view of mathematical
truth finds an affinity in Kant’s aesthetic
philosophy.
In the ‘‘Analytic of the Beautiful’’ in
the Critique of Judgment (Kant 1970),
beauty is characterized as disinterested
and as commanding universal assent,
that is, as transcending both the condi-
tions of time and space and the vagaries
of individual opinion. Kant calls this
subjective necessity. In order to make
this claim, he assumes that there is a
sensus communis of which only some
avail themselves. Thus, it is a condi-
tioned necessity, conditioned namely by
the contingency of its exercise. Such a
sensus communis accords entirely with
Brouwer’s view of mathematical truth,
just at it harmonizes with his view of
mathematics as art. However, just as in
the case of the actual construction of
mathematics, a difference between the
two thinkers obtains in the determina-
tion of the nature and limits of human
receptivity. For Kant, this subjective
necessity pertains to beauty, not truth;
his view of truth is conventionally sci-
entific. But Brouwer’s requirement of
universal assent to established mathe-
matical truths, once they are under-
stood, allows for more than their strong
kinship with Kant’s sensus communis—
it allows for their virtual interchange-
ability.
The experience of Thomas Hobbes
with the Pythagorean theorem, as
recorded in John Aubrey’s Brief Lives,
provides a wonderful instance of Brou-
wer’s claim that when a mathematical
truth is established it claims universal
assent to all who understand it:
He was 40 years old before he
looked in on Geometry; which hap-
pened accidentally. Being in a
Gentleman’s Library, Euclid’s Ele-
ments lay open, and ‘twas the 47 El.
libri I. He read the Proposition. By
God, sayd he (he would now and
then swear an emphaticall Oath by
way of emphasis) this is impossible!
So he reads the Demonstration of it,
which referred him back to such a
Proposition; which Proposition he
read. That referred him back to
another, which he also read. Et sic
deinceps that at last he was demon-
stratively convinced of that trueth.
This made him in love with Geome-
try (Aubrey 1957, p. 150).
Conclusion
In entirely different ways, both Brou-
wer and David Hilbert found
inspiration in the work of Kant. In fact,
Hilbert’s Foundations of Geometry
begins with this citation from the Cri-
tique of Pure Reason: ‘‘All human
knowledge begins with intuitions,
proceeds from there to concepts, and
ends with ideas’’ (Kant 2003 pp. A702,
B730). One reads this as foreshadowing
Hilbert’s formalism, in which the foun-
dations of mathematics rest on axi-
oms that reflect the deeper principles
embodied in knowledge that began in
the realm of Kantian intuitions. Hil-
bert’s success with Euclidean geometry
led him to hope that all of mathematics
could be grounded in abstract axio-
matics. His proof theory was a direct
result of this vision. It aimed to dem-
onstrate that the axioms for arithmetic
had to be consistent, a proposition
Hilbert believed was apodiktisch in the
sense of Kant. Ironically, these hopes
were dashed by another Kantian-ori-
ented mathematician, Kurt Gödel, in
1931. Yet one who had thoroughly
understood Hilbert’s Kantian Leitwort
might have realized that it was out of
place here. For Kant’s principal mes-
sage was that the ascent to uncondi-
tioned ideas leads reason into areas
beyond its scope and competence. On
the other hand, Brouwer’s rigorous
attention to intuition in Kant’s writings
makes him a more faithful Kantian, and
his creative appropriation of Kant’s
notion of pure intuition plays a direct
and positive role in his mathematical
work.
I hope that this brief apodeixis is
useful for appreciating the instinctive,
implicit, but acute affinity of Brouwer
for the Kantian philosophy, and that this
appreciation may be helpful in pro-
moting a deeper understanding of
Brouwer’s ideas on the foundations of
mathematics. In my research, I found a
most intriguing appraisal of Brouwer’s
influence in a London Times obituary
written by the logician and mathemati-
cian G. T. Kneebone, who likened
Brouwer to another philosopher whose
outlook and intellectual demeanor
seems far removed from Kant’s:
Brouwer was somewhat like Nietz-
sche in his ability to step outside the
established cultural tradition in order
to subject its most hallowed pre-
suppositions to cool and objective
scrutiny; and his questioning of prin-
ciples of thought led him to a Nietz-
schean revolution in the domain of
logic. He in fact rejected the univer-
sally accepted logic of deductive
reasoning which had been codified
initially by Aristotle, handed down
with very little change into modern
times, and very recently extended
and generalized out of all recognition
with the aid of mathematical sym-
bolism (Kneebone 1966).
In terms of his willingness to call long
held assumptions into radical question,
this comparison seems most appropri-
ate. Nietzsche’s influence is felt through-
out much of twentieth and twenty-first
century philosophy, as well as in litera-
ture, criticism, psychology and phil-
ology; and one can certainly make a
suggestive analogy to Brouwer’s influ-
ence upon mathematics. However, one
would be hard pressed to make a
comment upon Brouwer like the one
Heidegger made of his great prede-
cessor: ‘‘Nietzsche hat mich verrückt ge-

2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, Volume 31, Number 4, 2009
macht.’’ [‘‘Nietzsche has made me
crazy.’’] Brouwer sustained the essence
of his vision throughout his life, as
did Kant after 1781—the fundamental
insights were set, and any problems of
exegesis occurred in terms of them.
Brouwer proceeded more like a creative
artist than the much more prosaic Kant,
but, like Kant, he was guided by a sin-
gular vision. Theirs is an affinity of
kindred minds and of purposeful seek-
ers. The two cultures here are a
synthesis: A twoity that prefigures phi-
losophy and mathematics—a twoity that
can only be the product of imagination.
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Koç University
Sariyer-Istanbul
Turkey
e-mail: bdfphil@yahoo.com