See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/31311891

C.K. RAJU. Cultural Foundations of Mathematics: The

Nature of Mathematical Proof and the Transmission of
the Calculus from India to Europe in the 1....

Article  in  Philosophia Mathematica · October 2009

DOI: 10.1093/philmat/nkp003 · Source: OAI

CITATIONS READS

2 5,078

1 author:

José Ferreirós
Universidad de Sevilla
106 PUBLICATIONS   727 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

The genesis of geometric knowledge View project

All content following this page was uploaded by José Ferreirós on 03 October 2019.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

January 31, 2009 22:46

Philosophia Mathematica (III) 15 (2009), 1–4.

Critical Studies/Book Reviews

5 C.K. Raju. Cultural Foundations of Mathematics: The Nature of Math-
ematical Proof and the Transmission of the Calculus from India to
Europe in the 16th c. CE. History of Science, Philosophy and Culture in
Indian Civilization. Vol. X, Pt 4. New Delhi: Centre for Studies in Civi-
lizations/Delhi: Pearson Education, 2007. ISBN 81-317-0871-3. Pp. xlv +
10 477.
Reviewed by José Ferreirós∗
This book is part of a major project undertaken by the Centre for Studies
in Civilizations (New Delhi), being one of a total of ninety-six planned
15 volumes. The author is a statistician and computer scientist by training, who
has concentrated on historical matters for the last ten years or so. However,
the book has very ambitious aims, proposing an alternative philosophy of
mathematics and a deviant history of the calculus. Throughout, there is an
emphasis on the need to combine history and philosophy of mathematics,
20 especially in order to evaluate properly the history of mathematics in India,
in particular the history of the calculus.
The pivotal goals of the book are (i) to oppose the Eurocentric account
of the history of science in general and mathematics in particular; (ii) to
avoid the usual philosophical idea of the centrality of proof for mathe-
25 matical knowledge, in favour of the traditional Indian notion of pramana
[validation] encompassing empirical elements and emphasizing calcula-
tion; (iii) to analyze the thousand-year-long development of infinite series
in India, starting in the fifth century; and (iv) to show ‘how and why the
calculus was imported into Europe’ from about 1500. The result is a pic-
30 ture in which inputs from the Indian subcontinent and epistemology are
the driving forces of the history of mathematics, as people in the European
subcontinent struggle to adopt new calculation techniques from the East
in spite of Western philosophico-religious biases (pp. xxxix–xli). Thus, a
‘first math war’ involved the algorismus de numero indorum, adopted for
35 practical reasons, which forced Europeans to modify their epistemology
of number and quantities. A ‘second math war’ revolved around infinite
series and the calculus, since the background of Western epistemology
created ‘spurious difficulties’ about infinities and infinitesimals, partially
resolved with theories of real numbers. And a ‘third math war’ is under
40

∗ Departamento de Filosofia y Logica, Universidad de Sevilla, 41018 Sevilla, Spain.

josef@us.es

"C The Author [2009]. Published by Oxford University Press.

All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
January 31, 2009 22:46

2 PHILOSOPHIA MATHEMATICA

way, with computers forcing a new epistemological strife between math-

as-calculation and math-as-proof.
45 The book is stimulating to read and poses interesting questions, although
the author would have done better, I believe, to avoid opening so many
fronts and to concentrate instead on dealing adequately with some of
them. Often the tone is more that of a scientist writing popularization,
than an academic doing serious history or philosophy, and one regrets that
50 the editorial board did not work to temper Raju’s enthusiasm. The result
is unbalanced and presents some serious shortcomings. The following
remarks relate to part I, ‘The nature of mathematical proof’, which is
divided into two chapters, ‘Euclid and Hilbert’ and ‘Proof vs. pramana’,
corresponding roughly to aims (i) and (ii) above. Given the nature of this
55 journal, we shall not discuss the book’s central part, 210 pages (out of a
total of 477) devoted to a study of the origins of the calculus in India.
In his interest to revise traditional historiography and oppose proof-
centred mathematics, Raju devotes a lot of effort to questioning the exis-
tence of Euclid and insisting that the text of the Elements originates at the
60 earliest in 370 CE (with Theon) or perhaps even in the tenth century. In
my opinion, this is useless and does not help advance the author’s main
theses. For historical purposes, what is relevant is that Elements represents
a systematisation of a large portion of geometrical knowledge in the Greek-
speaking world before the common era. (‘Euclid’ is simply the name of
65 its otherwise unknown author, whose dates—it is true—are dubious; inci-
dentally, an interesting question would be whether philologists find reason
to think that the text of Elements was written by different authors.) Raju
insists on the idea that Proclus’s views represent the original philosophy
of mathematics in the Elements (p. 25), and he overemphasizes the con-
70 nections between geometrical proof, Platonism, and Christian religion (see
below).
The remarks on Hilbert and his ideas about proof are astonishingly
weak, suggesting that the author does not know Hilbert’s work, but at-
tributes to him assorted ideas about mathematical proof that Raju must
75 have known during university studies and academic life. The following
sentence of Hilbert will come as a big surprise to him:

There is no talk of arbitrariness here. Mathematics is not like a game

in which the problems are determined by rules invented arbitrarily—
80
it is a conceptual system [endowed] with inner necessity, that can
only be this and not any other way.1

1 Natur und Mathematisches Erkennen. David E. Rowe, ed. Basel: Birkhäuser, 1992,
p. 14 (text of a lecture course delivered at Göttingen in 1919–1920). Contrast with words
that are often attributed to Hilbert, such as: ‘Mathematics is a game played according to
January 31, 2009 22:46

CRITICAL STUDIES/BOOK REVIEWS 3

85 Even more surprised, however, would Hilbert be if he could learn of Raju’s

assertions, such as when he says that Hilberts view of mathematics ‘was
entirely mechanical—where Proclus sought to persuade human beings,
Hilbert sought to persuade machines!’ (p. 69; this assumes, wrongly, that
Hilbert’s proof theory represents his whole conception of mathematics);
90 or the following astonishing remark:

Hilbert’s notion of proof is derived from the Procluvian notion of

proof [i.e., that of Proclus] by eliminating all empirical, political,
and human significance in the latter, and bringing it in line with
95 later-day Christian theological beliefs. (p. 9; notice that Hilbert had
little sympathy for religion.)

Absurd as these assertions are, however, I would not like readers to entirely
discard Raju’s text on the basis of them.
100 In previous work of the 1990s, Raju dealt with the philosophy of time
in connection with quantum mechanics and quasi-truth-functional logic.
His chapter 2 emphasizes that bivalent logic is not ‘universal’, meaning not
shared by all cultures or philosophical schools, and that, because formal-
istic philosophy of mathematics has rejected the empirical, the choice of
105 classical logic can only be ‘based on social and cultural authority’ (pp. 88–
90, 99). Looking for the historical background of the Western adoption of
classical logic, he points to the connections between geometry, math-as-
proof, and Christian religion. Hence also his concern to link Proclus with
the Elements, and to explain the transformation of the original philosophy
110 of the Elements at the hands of Christians. There is, however, an interest-
ing parallel between this reconstruction and the situation with traditional
logical schools in India, as they were linked with religious ideas and, ac-
cording to Raju, also with different understandings of time. Unfortunately,
the corresponding discussion is not a good introduction to the history of
115 logical ideas in India, making scattered comments about them in a quick,
less than clear, way. It is to be expected that this topic is treated in some
other volume of the series, but the reader finds no cross-reference.
Raju thus proposes to deviate from classical logic, taking into account
the empirical, in search of ‘the logic of the empirical world’ (p. 89).
120 Although we cannot enter into the question in any detail, let me sketch an
argument that Raju does not seem to consider. As usually understood, logic
is not concerned with the world, but with assertions about the world—
or more generally, with representations of phenomena. Logic is not a
reflection on ontological matters, but on language and representations.
125 And when it comes to representing, it seems most natural to consider just

certain simple rules with meaningless marks on paper’, a sentence that cannot be found
anywhere in his papers, books or lectures, and severely misrepresents his thought.
 January 31, 2009 22:46

4 PHILOSOPHIA MATHEMATICA

two options: a representation can be either adequate (to some degree of

accuracy) or inadequate, tertium exclusum. This way of grounding bivalent
logic, by the way, has little to do with culturally charged conceptions of God
130 or religion or the mind. (That, however, is not to say that there have been
no historical connections between Western mathematics and religion; but
in my view the topic should be pursued along a line different from Raju’s
insistence on the alleged theological basis of Western notions of logic and
proof.)
135 The author asserts that abolishing the separation between mathemat-
ics and empirical science ‘is fatal to the present-day (Western) notion of
mathematics’ (p. xxxix). This suggests that he is not well acquainted with
relevant philosophical literature, such as Quine or Putnam, or relevant his-
torical figures like Riemann, Poincaré, Weyl, or even Hilbert. The assertion
140 is linked with his insistence throughout on considering formalism and a
formal notion of proof as the quintessence of modern mathematics, but
this view, perhaps natural in a computer scientist, is highly dubious and
ignores too many other aspects of the discipline.
To conclude my partial summary of the relevant parts of this book, on
145 the basis of his twofold criticism of the ideal of proof (based on its theo-
logical underpinnings and its reliance on bivalent logic), Raju concludes
that mathematics is best conceived as calculation, not proof. This leads
him, e.g., to question the usual theories of real numbers (which he again
qualifies as ‘formal’, in my opinion wrongly) and to argue for a flexible
150 computational approach to numbers, more in line with the tradition of
Indian mathematics. Since in Raju’s view the choice of logic must de-
pend on empirical considerations, and logic in turn determines inference
and proof, he finds reason to believe that the Western separation of proof
from the empirical is fundamentally wrong. Hence his preference for the
155 traditional Indian notion of pramana, and also his insistence throughout
this work that ‘deduction will forever remain more fallible than induction’
(e.g., p. 99). In this reviewer’s opinion, and for the reasons sketched above,
the argument remains far from convincing.
In conclusion, the book under review addresses many questions in an
160 intriguing but often deficient way. The volume will best be approached as
a thought-provoking program for future work that has still to be carried
out in a thorough and scholarly way.

165

View publication stats