Stanisław Leśniewski: Rethinking the Philosophy of Mathematics

Near the end of the nineteenth century, a part of mathematical research was focused on unification: the goal was to find ‘one sort of thing’ that mathematics is (or could be taken to be) about. Quite quickly sets became the main candidate for this position. While the enterprise hit a rough patch with Frege’s failure and set-theoretic paradoxes, by the 1920s mathematicians (roughly speaking) settled on a promising axiomatization of set theory and considered it foundational. In parallel to this development was the work of Stanislaw Leśniewski (1886–1939), a Polish logician who did not accept the existence of abstract (aspatial, atemporal and acausal) objects such as sets. Leśniewski attempted to find a nominalistically acceptable replacement for set theory in the foundations of mathematics. His candidate was Mereology – a theory which, instead of sets and elements, spoke of wholes and parts. The goal of this paper will be to present Mereology in this context, to evaluate the feasibility of Leśniewski’s project and to briefly comment on its contemporary relevance.