Cliver, Gwyneth E. (Author)
Washington University in St. Louis
Koepnick, Lutz
Publication date: 2008
Language: English
Edition Details: Advisor: Koepnick, Lutz
Physical Details: 265 pp.
***** At the beginning of the twentieth century, mathematicians attempted to revolutionize symbolic logic so that it would be capable of axiomatizing all of mathematics. This interdisciplinary dissertation examines how these and other efforts in mathematical theory, symbolic logic, and the philosophical frameworks that supported them shaped the modernist literature of Robert Musil and Hermann Broch and what, in turn, their works reveal about the philosophy of mathematics. The first chapter relates the controversy of the foundational debate among early twentieth-century mathematicians about the nature of such categories as "truth" and "reality" with that in the Science Wars, positing mathematics as an area of compromise: one which is highly rational in its structure but nevertheless embraces certain irrational elements as ineradicable. The second chapter investigates the relationship between the rational and the irrational in the authors' texts. Their texts repudiate positivism's distinct division of the two categories and instead conceive them as inextricably linked, linearly or cyclically. The third chapter analyzes infinity as both a mathematical and philosophical concept, showing that the characters experience the infinite in all of its manifestations as sublime. The final chapter considers the affiliation of mathematics and mysticism in the texts. As in Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-philosophicus, mathematics becomes a ladder on which to climb to this mystical realm and which must be discarded once this realm is reached. The dissertation concludes that the foundations crisis in mathematics contributes to a broad, modernist suspicion of a universal faith in scientific progress and of hyperrationality. The figures in the texts of Musil and Broch hope to employ mathematics to resolve their philosophical dilemmas, only to discover the limitations of the language of mathematics, to seek answers elsewhere, and to embrace mysticism as complementary to scientific inquiry. *****
...MoreDescription Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 69/09 (2009). Pub. no. AAT 3332077.
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