Avicenna on Mathematical Infinity

Abstract

Avicenna believed in mathematical finitism. He argued that magnitudes and sets of ordered numbers and numbered things cannot be actually infinite. In this paper, I discuss his arguments against the actuality of mathematical infinity. A careful analysis of the subtleties of his main argument, i.e., The Mapping Argument, shows that, by employing the notion of correspondence as a tool for comparing the sizes of mathematical infinities, he arrived at a very deep and insightful understanding of the notion of mathematical infinity, one that is much more modern than we might expect. I argue moreover that Avicenna’s mathematical finitism is interwoven with his literalist ontology of mathematics, according to which mathematical objects are properties of existing physical objects.