Introduction and Overview

This chapter reviews some of the most fundamental stages in the development of Weyl’s philosophy of mathematics, giving prominence to those aspects of Weyl’s thought that are of more direct significance for the present volume. For example, it reviews key features of Weyl’s Habilitation lecture, his Continuum, his 1921 intuitionistic foundations of analysis and his symbolic phase. It then considers predicativity after Weyl, recalling important developments in mathematical logic in the 1950’s and 1960’s. It concludes with a brief overview of the individual chapters in this volume.