Abstract

The heroic era in philosophy of mathematics being taken to extend from Frege to Quine, more recent developments of the past twenty or twenty-five years are widely felt to be disappointing by comparison, suggesting even that the original impulse may well have exhausted itself. A kind of hunkering down is nowhere so evident as in the eminently sober if not somber papers of Charles Parsons to which "philosophy of mathematics" as an ongoing discipline has been heavily indebted during these lean years. Transitional in a personal as well as a historical sense, the Selected Essays consist in the main of pre-1978 material by Parsons, though there are various postscripts and, especially, the introduction to the volume that advance us to the cutting-edge of the present.