"I am almost amazed that you consider a professional philosopher capable of no confusion in concepts and definitions. Such things are nowhere more at home than among philosophers who are not mathematicians, and Wolff was no mathematician, even though he made cheap compen- diums. Look around among the philosophers of today, among Schelling, Hegel, Nees von Esenbeck, and their like; doesn t your hair stand on end at their definitions? Read in the history of ancient philosophy what kinds of definitions the men of that day, Plato and others, gave (I except Aristotle). But even in Kant it is often not much better; in my opinion his distinction between analytic and synthetic theorems is such a one that either peters out in a triviality or is false."
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Academics from GermanyInventorsMathematicians from GermanyPhysicists from GermanyAstronomers from Germany
Original Language: English
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As quoted in Carl Friedrich Gauss: Titan of Science (1955) by Guy Waldo Dunnington. p. 362
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Carl_Friedrich_Gauss
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Carl Friedrich Gauss
Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss (30 April 1777 – 23 February 1855) was a German mathematician, astronomer and physicist.
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