Abstract

The influence of Kant's philosophy as a whole, have certainly been great enough so that this by itself would be enough to make Kant's philosophy of arithmetic of interest to historical scholars. It is also possible to show the influence of Kant on a number of important later writers on the foundations of Arithmetic, so that Kant has importance specifically as a figure in the history of the philosophical of mathematics. However, my aim in this article has been animated by the conviction that even today what Kant has to say about mathematics, and arithmetic in particular, is of interest to the philosophy. Indeed, a central problem for Kant's arithmetic philosophy was why the knowledge so obtained can be applied to all experience a priori and with certainty. There is an important aspect of Kant's answer to that question that I hardly touched on, namely the argument in the Analytic for the claim that mathematics necessarily applies to the objects of 'empirical intuition'.