FABRIZIO PALOMBI, The Star & The Whole: Gian-Carlo Rota on Mathematics and Phenomenology. Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2011. ISBN 978-1-56881-583-1 (pbk). Pp. xiv + 124. English translation of La stella e l'intero: La ricerca di Gian-Carlo Rota tra matematica e fenomenologia. 2nd rev. ed. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2003

Abstract

‘Whatever will happen in the world of mind happens first in the small world of mathematics’, Gian-Carlo Rota wrote [Rota, 1995, p. 162], and his philosophical thought was always closely connected to his deep and wide mathematical experience. Rota (1932–1999) began his mathematical career in functional analysis but soon shifted to combinatorics, his contributions to which earned him the Steele Prize in 1988. In philosophy, from 1957 on he became ever more deeply invested in Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology, teaching yearly courses on these topics in MIT’s mathematics department from 1972 until the end of his life. His gravestone bears the inscription ‘mathematician-philosopher’. Whoever made that choice no doubt alluded to the fact that this was the title Galileo requested, and was granted, when appointed by the Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1610. Rota was adamant that rewriting the great book of (not nature but) philosophy in the language of mathematics is not possible. Mathematics and philosophy, he argued, are too heterogeneous for that; hence his criticism of the logical positivists and other ‘mathematizing philosophers’.1 At the same time, he held that mathematics and philosophy are closely related in other ways, which he was certainly not the first to identify, but which his papers present in a particularly forceful and elegant manner: