Connecting the Revolutionary with the Conventional: Rethinking the Differences between the Works of Brouwer, Heyting, and Weyl

Abstract

Brouwer’s intuitionism was a far-reaching attempt to reform the foundations of mathematics. While the mathematical community was reluctant to accept Brouwer’s work, its response to later-developed brands of intuitionism, such as those presented by Hermann Weyl and Arend Heyting, was different. The paper accounts for this difference by analyzing the intuitionistic versions of Brouwer, Weyl, and Heyting in light of a two-tiered model of the body and image of mathematical knowledge. Such a perspective provides a richer account of each story and points to a possible connection between the community’s reaction and the changes each mathematician had proposed.