CfP special issue of Philosophia Scientiae on Giuseppe Peano and his School: logic, epistemology and didactics

Peano's axioms for arithmetic, published in 1889, are ubiquitously cited in the writings on modern axiomatics. And his Formulary is often quoted as the precursor of Russell's Principia Mathematica, but a comprehensive historical and philosophical evaluation of the contributions of the Peano School to mathematics, logic, and the foundation of mathematics is still to be achieved.

Several reasons explain the loss of philosophical interest for the member of the school: the non-academic nature of the group, the multiform topics of interest (going from mathematical analysis to geometry, from linguistics to universal languages, from philosophical pragmatism to logicism), the scarce attention given to the transformation of mathematics and to the development of set theory after 1910, and the non monolithic philosophical perspective developed in the school. Yet the views held by Peano and other members of the school not only had a strong impact on the writings by Frege, Russell, Carnap and Gödel, but can also be fruitfully explored in order to understand the development of certain philosophical isms, such as logicism and structuralism.

The thematic issue will publish two kinds of contributions: historical analyses of the logical, mathematical, foundational and didactical writings by Peano and the members of the school; philosophical investigations on the relation between Peano's axiomatics and the approaches by Dedekind, Frege, Hilbert, Russell, Carnap, and Gödel. Manuscripts should be submitted in French, English, or German, and prepared for anonymous peer review.