This book treats eighteenth-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico’s theory of poetic logic for the first time as the originating force in mathematics, transforming instinctive counting and spatial perception into poetic (metaphorical) symbolism that dovetails with the origin of language.
Marcel Danesi is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. He has written extensively on the relation between mathematics and symbol systems, including how puzzles and problems in mathematics are part of a more general dialectic frame of mind for grasping the nature of reality. Among his works in the field are Language and Mathematics (2018) and Ahmes’ Legacy (2020). He also founded the CogSci Network at the Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences, which consists of internationally renowned researchers in the field of cognitive mathematics.