Signification et vérité dans les écrits philosophico-mathématiques de Jacob Klein

Abstract

Jacob Klein’s account of historicity belonging to the basic units of meaning in ancient Greek and modern European thought is presented and examined in relation to the “meaning of Being” in Heidegger’s phenomenological thought and Husserl’s account of symbolic calculus’ instrumental ontological significance. Against the background of Klein’s reconstructions of eidetic numbers in Plato’s Sophist and Descartes’ ontology of indeterminate mathematical objects, two claims are advanced: (1) that Being’s “arithmological” composition in Plato’s Sophist challenges the fundamentality of “meaning” in Heidegger’s historicity of Being and (2) that the constitution of the conceptuality proper to the symbolic calculus’ basic units transcends that of Husserl’s account of their “mere” instrumentality.

Keywords

• Husserl
• eidetic numbers
• historicity
• Klein Jacob
• Heidegger
• meaning of Being