After Euclid

What is it to have visual intuition? Can we obtain geometrical knowledge by using visual reasoning? And if we can, is this because we have a faculty of intuition?

This book addresses these questions. It shows how mainstream philosophers since Leibniz have wrongly ignored visual reasoning as a source of knowledge; and how even basic geometrical reasoning that uses diagrams can be explained without using any appeal to a faculty of intuition. In so doing, this book helps to rehabilitate an ancient but long-disregarded tradition as it presents the first detailed philosophical case study of that branch of mathematical reasoning.

Jesse Norman is honorary research fellow in philosophy at University College London.

Contents

6/1/2006