Abstract

The chapter presents the main aspects of the great transformation from the intuitive to the symbolic, the key epistemic movement of the second half of the nineteenth century. Around 1900, the crisis of intuition—which resulted from the arithmetization of mathematics, the elaboration of non-Euclidian geometries, the field theoretical turn in physics, and the calculization of formal logic—weighed heavily on the entire space of knowledge. It came to a head in the philosophical confrontation about the matter of thinking, about whether thinking was grounded intuitively or symbolically. The new age of symbolic thinking that began there— whose agenda was nothing short of the purely formal description of what had previously been unthought and unthinkable about thinking itself, indeed about the reality of the mind—pushed the autonomization and ultimately the machinization of the symbolic. Leibniz—a very specific Leibniz, mobilized around 1900 particularly by the French philosopher and mathematician Louis Couturat as a pioneer of the blind use of symbols against Kant and the primacy of intuition—is being turned into the philosophical godfather of this movement.

Keywords: intuitionism versus formalism; crisis of intuition; calculization of thinking; purely symbolic thinking; Louis Couturat