Kairos. Journal of Philosophy & Science 22, 2019 Center for the Philosophy of Sciences of Lisbon University The Role of Intuition and Formal Thinking in Kant, Riemann, Husserl, Poincare, Weyl, and in Current Mathematics and Physics “Mathematics is a very human exploration of the patterns of the world, one which thrives on play and surprise and beauty”. (Hermann Weyl, 1949) “Many people have an impression that mathematics is an austere and formal subject concerned with complicated and ultimately confusing rules for the manipulation of numbers, symbols and equations, rather like the preparation of a complicated income tax return. Good mathematics is quite opposite to this. Mathematics is an art of human understanding… […] A given mathematical concept might be primarily a symbolic equation, a picture, a rhythmic pattern, a short movie — or best of all, an integrated combination of several different representations”. (William Thurston, 2009) Luciano Boi Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Centre de Mathématiques
[email protected] DOI 10.2478/kjps-2019–0007 Abstract. According to Kant, the axioms of intuition, i.e. space and time, must pro- vide an organization of the sensory experience. However, this first orderliness of empirical sensations seems to depend on a kind of faculty pertaining to subjecti- vity, rather than to the encounter of these same intuitions with the real properties of phenomena. Starting from an analysis of some very significant developments in mathematical and theoretical physics in the last decades, in which intuition played an important role, we argue that nevertheless intuition comes into play in a fun- damentally different way to that which Kant had foreseen: in the form of a formal or “categorical” yet not sensible intuition.