What counts as an intuitively plausible set theoretic content (notion, axiom or theorem) has been a matter of much debate in contemporary philosophy of mathematics. In this paper I develop a critical appraisal of the issue. I analyze first R. B. Jensen's positions on the epistemic status of the axiom of constructibility. I then formulate and discuss a view of intuitiveness in set theory that assumes it to hinge basically on mathematical success. At the same time, I present accounts of set theoretic axioms and theorems formulated in non-strictly mathematical terms, e.g., by appealing to the iterative concept of set and/or to overall methodological principles, like unify and maximize, and investigate the relation of the latter to success in mathematics.

Set theory deals with the most fundamental existence questions in mathematics-questions which affect other areas of mathematics, from the real numbers to structures of all kinds, but which are posed as dealing with the existence of sets. Especially noteworthy are principles establishing the existence of some infinite sets, the so-called “arbitrary sets.” This paper is devoted to an analysis of the motivating goal of studying arbitrary sets, usually referred to under the labels of quasi-combinatorialism or combinatorial maximality. After explaining what is meant by definability and by “arbitrariness,” a first historical part discusses the strong motives why set theory was conceived as a theory of arbitrary sets, emphasizing connections with analysis and particularly with the continuum of real numbers. Judged from this perspective, the axiom of choice stands out as a most central and natural set-theoretic principle (in the sense of quasi-combinatorialism). A second part starts by considering the potential mismatch between the formal systems of mathematics and their motivating conceptions, and proceeds to offer an elementary discussion of how far the Zermelo–Fraenkel system goes in laying out principles that capture the idea of “arbitrary sets”. We argue that the theory is rather poor in this respect.

We investigate Turing's contributions to computability theory for real numbers and real functions presented in [22, 24, 26]. In particular, it is shown how two fundamental approaches to computable analysis, the so-called ‘Type-2 Theory of Effectivity’ (TTE) and the ‘realRAM machine’ model, have their foundations in Turing's work, in spite of the two incompatible notions of computability they involve. It is also shown, by contrast, how the modern conceptual tools provided by these two paradigms allow a systematic interpretation of Turing's pioneering work in the subject.

We present a list of open questions in reverse mathematics, including some relevant background information for each question. We also mention some of the areas of reverse mathematics that are starting to be developed and where interesting open question may be found.

We give a new proof of Friedman's conjecture that every uncountable set of reals has a member of each hyperdegree greater than or equal to the hyperjump.