Bolzano, Bernard
Bolzano, Bernard
(1781-1848) Austrian philosopher and mathematician. Professor of the philosophy of religion at Prague, 1805-1820, he was compelled to resign in the latter year because of his rationalistic tendencies in theology and afterwards held no academic position. His Wissenschaftslehre of 1837, while it is to be classed as a work on traditional logic, contains significant anticipations of many ideas which have since become important in symbolic logic and mathematics. In his posthumously published Paradoxien des Unendlitchen (1851) he appears as a forerunner in some respects of Cantor’s theory of transfinite numbers. –A.C.
W. Dubislav, Bolzano als Vorlaufer der mathematischen Logik, Philosophisches Jahrbuch der Gorres-Gesellschaft, vol 44 (1931), pp. 448-456. H. Scholz, Die Wissenschaftslehre Bolzanos, Abhandlungen der Frieds’schen Schule , n. s. vol. 6 (1937), pp 399-472.