Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
In philosophy and theology, infinity is explored in articles under headings such as the Absolute, God, and Zeno's paradoxes. In Greek philosophy, for example in Anaximander, 'the Boundless' is the origin of all that is. He took the beginning or first principle to be an endless, unlimited primordial mass (ἄπειρον, apeiron).
In the philosophy of mathematics, the abstraction of actual infinity, also called completed infinity, [1] involves infinite entities as given, actual and completed objects. Since Greek antiquity , the concept of actual infinity has been a subject of debate among philosophers.
In this usage, infinity is a mathematical concept, and infinite mathematical objects can be studied, manipulated, and used just like any other mathematical object. The mathematical concept of infinity refines and extends the old philosophical concept, in particular by introducing infinitely many different sizes of infinite sets.
The apeiron is central to the cosmological theory created by Anaximander, a 6th-century BC pre-Socratic Greek philosopher whose work is mostly lost. From the few existing fragments, we learn that he believed the beginning or ultimate reality is eternal and infinite, or boundless (apeiron), subject to neither old age nor decay, which perpetually yields fresh materials from which everything we ...
Philosophy of science; Infinitism is the view that knowledge may be justified by an infinite chain of reasons. It belongs to epistemology, the branch of philosophy ...
Zeno devised these paradoxes to support his teacher Parmenides's philosophy of monism, which posits that despite our sensory experiences, reality is singular and unchanging. The paradoxes famously challenge the notions of plurality (the existence of many things), motion, space, and time by suggesting they lead to logical contradictions .
Infinite divisibility arises in different ways in philosophy, physics, economics, order theory (a branch of mathematics), and probability theory (also a branch of mathematics). One may speak of infinite divisibility, or the lack thereof, of matter , space , time , money , or abstract mathematical objects such as the continuum .
For an infinite regress argument to be successful, it has to show that the involved regress is vicious. [3] A non-vicious regress is called virtuous or benign. [5] Traditionally, it was often assumed without much argument that each infinite regress is vicious but this assumption has been put into question in contemporary philosophy.