E. Fischer – författare

Speakers can get to know the meaning of any of indefinitely many sentences that they have never heard before. This statement encapsulates the problem of linguistic creativity, which lies at the core of philosophy of language and theoretical linguistics. It has also sparked off a considerable amount of work on the philosophy of mind. After establishing the failure of the familiar compositional approach to the problem, the book adopts a radically new start. It develops core elements of the later Wittgenstein's conception of philosophy, putting them to work to "dissolve" the problem, proving it ill-framed by clarifying the questions posing it and breaking the spell of mistaken analogies that inform it. This sharply focused monograph thus has a dual aim: coping with a crucial problem that turns out to be a lot tougher than is generally supposed, and presenting a precise and rigorous demonstration of an unfamiliar and exciting philosophical approach.

There are a great deal of books on introductory analysis in print today, many written by mathematicians of the first rank. The publication of another such book therefore warrants a defense. I have taught analysis for many years and have used a variety of texts during this time. These books were of excellent quality mathematically but did not satisfy the needs of the students I was teaching. They were written for mathematicians but not for those who were first aspiring to attain that status. The desire to fill this gap gave rise to the writing of this book. This book is intended to serve as a text for an introductory course in analysis. Its readers will most likely be mathematics, science, or engineering majors undertaking the last quarter of their undergraduate education. The aim of a first course in analysis is to provide the student with a sound foundation for analysis, to familiarize him with the kind of careful thinking used in advanced mathematics, and to provide him with tools for further work in it. The typical student we are dealing with has completed a three-semester calculus course and possibly an introductory course in differential equations. He may even have been exposed to a semester or two of modern algebra. All this time his training has most likely been intuitive with heuristics taking the place of proof. This may have been appropriate for that stage of his development.

Dieser Buchtitel ist Teil des Digitalisierungsprojekts Springer Book Archives mit Publikationen, die seit den Anfängen des Verlags von 1842 erschienen sind. Der Verlag stellt mit diesem Archiv Quellen für die historische wie auch die disziplingeschichtliche Forschung zur Verfügung, die jeweils im historischen Kontext betrachtet werden müssen. Dieser Titel erschien in der Zeit vor 1945 und wird daher in seiner zeittypischen politisch-ideologischen Ausrichtung vom Verlag nicht beworben.