Not Quite Yet a Hazy Limbo of Mystery: Intuition in Russell’s An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry

Abstract

I argue that in Bertrand Russell’s An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry (1897), his forms of externality serve the same fundamental role in grounding the possibility of geometry that Immanuel Kant’s forms of intuition serve in grounding geometry in his critical philosophy. Specifically, both provide knowledge of bare numerical difference, where we have no concept of this difference. Because geometry deals with such conceptually homogeneous magnitudes and their composition on both accounts, forms of intuition or externality (respectively) are at its foundation.