Bernard Bolzano (, ; ; ; born Bernardus Placidus Johann Nepomuk Bolzano; 5 October 1781 – 18 December 1848) was a Bohemian mathematician, logician, philosopher, theologian and Catholic priest of Italian extraction, also known for his liberal views.
Bolzano wrote in German, his native language. For the most part, his work came to prominence posthumously.
Family Bolzano was the son of two pious Catholics. His father, Bernard Pompeius Bolzano, was an Italian who had moved to Prague, where he married Maria Cecilia Maurer who came from Prague's German-speaking family Maurer. Only two of their twelve children lived to adulthood.
Career When he was ten years old, Bolzano entered the Gymnasium of the Piarists in Prague, which he attended from 1791 to 1796.
Bolzano entered the University of Prague in 1796 and studied mathematics, philosophy and physics. Starting in 1800, he also began studying theology, becoming a Catholic priest in 1804. He was appointed to the new chair of philosophy of religion at Prague University in 1805. He proved to be a popular lecturer not only in religion but also in philosophy, and he was elected Dean of the Philosophical Faculty in 1818.
Bolzano alienated many faculty and church leaders with his teachings of the social waste of militarism and the needlessness of war. He urged a total reform of the educational, social and economic systems that would direct the nation's interests toward peace rather than toward armed conflict between nations. His political convictions, which he was inclined to share with others with some frequency, eventually proved to be too liberal for the Austrian authorities. On 24 December 1819, he was removed from his professorship (upon his refusal to recant his beliefs) and was exiled to the countryside and then devoted his energies to his writings on social, religious, philosophical, and mathematical matters.
Although forbidden to publish in mainstream journals as a condition of his exile, Bolzano continued to develop his ideas and publish them either on his own or in obscure Eastern European journals. In 1842 he moved back to Prague, where he died in 1848.
Mathematical work Bolzano made several original contributions to mathematics. His overall philosophical stance was that, contrary to much of the prevailing mathematics of the era, it was better not to introduce intuitive ideas such as time and motion into mathematics. To this end, he was one of the earliest mathematicians to begin instilling rigor into mathematical analysis with his three chief mathematical works Beyträge zu einer begründeteren Darstellung der Mathematik (1810), Der binomische Lehrsatz (1816) and Rein analytischer Beweis (1817). These works presented "...a sample of a new way of developing analysis", whose ultimate goal would not be realized until some fifty years later when they came to the attention of Karl Weierstrass.
To the foundations of mathematical analysis he contributed the introduction of a fully rigorous ε–δ definition of a mathematical limit. Bolzano was the first to recognize the greatest lower bound property of the real numbers. Like several others of his day, he was skeptical of the possibility of Gottfried Leibniz's infinitesimals, that had been the earliest putative foundation for differential calculus. Bolzano's notion of a limit was similar to the modern one: that a limit, rather than being a relation among infinitesimals, must instead be cast in terms of how the dependent variable approaches a definite quantity as the independent variable approaches some other definite quantity.
Bolzano also gave the first purely analytic proof of the fundamental theorem of algebra, which had originally been proven by Gauss from geometrical considerations. He also gave the first purely analytic proof of the intermediate value theorem (also known as Bolzano's theorem). Today he is mostly remembered for the Bolzano–Weierstrass theorem, which Karl Weierstrass developed independently and published years after Bolzano's first proof and which was initially called the Weierstrass theorem until Bolzano's earlier work was rediscovered.
Philosophical work Bolzano's posthumously published work Paradoxien des Unendlichen (The Paradoxes of the Infinite) (1851) was greatly admired by many of the eminent logicians who came after him, including Charles Sanders Peirce, Georg Cantor, and Richard Dedekind. Bolzano's main claim to fame, however, is his 1837 Wissenschaftslehre (Theory of Science), a work in four volumes that covered not only philosophy of science in the modern sense but also logic, epistemology and scientific pedagogy. The logical theory that Bolzano developed in this work has come to be acknowledged as ground-breaking. Other works are a four-volume Lehrbuch der Religionswissenschaft (Textbook of the Science of Religion) and the metaphysical work Athanasia, a defense of the immortality of the soul. Bolzano also did valuable work in mathematics, which remained virtually unknown until Otto Stolz rediscovered many of his lost journal articles and republished them in 1881.
Wissenschaftslehre (Theory of Science) In his 1837 Wissenschaftslehre Bolzano attempted to provide logical foundations for all sciences, building on abstractions like part-relation, abstract objects, attributes, sentence-shapes, ideas and propositions in themselves, sums and sets, collections, substances, adherences, subjective ideas, judgments, and sentence-occurrences. These attempts were an extension of his earlier thoughts in the philosophy of mathematics, for example his 1810 Beiträge where he emphasized the distinction between the objective relationship between logical consequences and our subjective recognition of these connections. For Bolzano, it was not enough that we merely have confirmation of natural or mathematical truths, but rather it was the proper role of the sciences (both pure and applied) to seek out justification in terms of the fundamental truths that may or may not appear to be obvious to our intuitions.
Introduction to Wissenschaftslehre Bolzano begins his work by explaining what he means by theory of science, and the relation between our knowledge, truths and sciences. Human knowledge, he states, is made of all truths (or true propositions) that men know or have known. However, this is a very small fraction of all the truths that exist, although still too much for one human being to comprehend. Therefore, our knowledge is divided into more accessible parts. Such a collection of truths is what Bolzano calls a science (Wissenschaft). Not all true propositions of a science have to be known to men; hence, this is how we can make discoveries in a science.
To better understand and comprehend the truths of a science, men have created textbooks (Lehrbuch), which of course contain only the true propositions of the science known to men. But how to know where to divide our knowledge, that is, which truths belong together? Bolzano explains that we will ultimately know this through some reflection, but that the resulting rules of how to divide our knowledge into sciences will be a science in itself. This science, that tells us which truths belong together and should be explained in a textbook, is the Theory of Science (Wissenschaftslehre).
Metaphysics In the Wissenschaftslehre, Bolzano is mainly concerned with three realms:
(1) The realm of language, consisting in words and sentences. (2) The realm of thought, consisting in subjective ideas and judgements. (3) The realm of logic, consisting in objective ideas (or ideas in themselves) and propositions in themselves.
Bolzano devotes a great part of the Wissenschaftslehre to an explanation of these realms and their relations.
Two distinctions play a prominent role in his system. First, the distinction between parts and wholes. For instance, words are parts of sentences, subjective ideas are parts of judgments, objective ideas are parts of propositions in themselves. Second, all objects divide into those that exist, which means that they are causally connected and located in time and/or space, and those that do not exist. Bolzano's original claim is that the logical realm is populated by objects of the latter kind.
Satz an Sich (proposition in itself) Satz an Sich is a basic notion in Bolzano's Wissenschaftslehre. It is introduced at the very beginning, in section 19. Bolzano first introduces the notions of proposition (spoken or written or thought or in itself) and idea (spoken or written or thought or in itself). "The grass is green" is a proposition (Satz): in this connection of words, something is said or asserted. "Grass", however, is only an idea (Vorstellung). Something is represented by it, but it does not assert anything. Bolzano's notion of proposition is fairly broad: "A rectangle is round" is a proposition — even though it is false by virtue of self-contradiction — because it is composed in an intelligible manner out of intelligible parts.
Bolzano does not give a complete definition of a Satz an Sich (i.e. proposition in itself) but he gives us just enough information to understand what he means by it. A proposition in itself (i) has no existence (that is: it has no position in time or place), (ii) is either true or false, independent of anyone knowing or thinking that it is true or false, and (iii) is what is 'grasped' by thinking beings. So a written sentence ('Socrates has wisdom') grasps a proposition in itself, namely the proposition [Socrates has wisdom]. The written sentence does have existence (it has a certain location at a certain time, say it is on your computer screen at this very moment) and expresses the proposition in itself which is in the realm of in itself (i.e. an sich). (Bolzano's use of the term an sich differs greatly from that of Kant; for Kant's use of the term see an sich.)Bolzano, "On the Mathematical Method", §2
Every proposition in itself is composed out of ideas in themselves (for simplicity, we will use proposition to mean "proposition in itself" and idea to refer to an objective idea or idea in itself). Ideas are negatively defined as those parts of a proposition that are themselves not propositions. A proposition consists of at least three ideas, namely: a subject idea, a predicate idea and the copula (i.e. 'has', or another form of to have). (Though there are propositions which contain propositions, we won't take them into consideration right now.)
Bolzano identifies certain types of ideas. There are simple ideas that have no parts (as an example Bolzano uses [something]), but there are also complex ideas that consist of other ideas (Bolzano uses the example of [nothing], which consists of the ideas [not] and [something]). Complex ideas can have the same content (i.e. the same parts) without being the same — because their components are differently connected. The idea [A black pen with blue ink] is different from the idea [A blue pen with black ink] though the parts of both ideas are the same.Bolzano, "On the Mathematical Method", §3
Ideas and objects It is important to understand that an idea does not need to have an object. Bolzano uses object to denote something that is represented by an idea. An idea that has an object, represents that object. But an idea that does not have an object represents nothing. (Don't get confused here by terminology: an objectless idea is an idea without a representation.)
Consider, for further explanation, an example used by Bolzano. The idea [a round square], does not have an object, because the object that ought to be represented is self-contradictory. A different example is the idea [nothing] which certainly does not have an object. However, the proposition [the idea of a round square has complexity] has as its subject-idea [the idea of a round square]. This subject-idea does have an object, namely the idea [a round square]. But, that idea does not have an object.