In these latter years numerous works have been published on pure mathematics and the philosophy of mathematics, trying to separate and isolate the logical elements of mathematical reasoning. These works have been analyzed and expounded very clearly by M. Couturat in a book entitled: _The Principles of Mathematics_.
For M. Couturat, the new works, and in particular those of Russell and Peano, have finally settled the controversy, so long pending between Leibnitz and Kant. They have shown that there are no synthetic judgments a priori (Kant's phrase to designate judgments which can neither be demonstrated analytically, nor reduced to identities, nor established experimentally), they have shown that mathematics is entirely reducible to logic and that intuition here plays no rôle.
This is what M. Couturat has set forth in the work just cited; this he says still more explicitly in his Kant jubilee discourse, so that I heard my neighbor whisper: "I well see this is the centenary of Kant's _death_."
Can we subscribe to this conclusive condemnation? I think not, and I shall try to show why.
