Alexandre Koyré in the ``Mekka of mathematics''. Koyré's Göttingen draft of the dissertation (Q1819173)

Drawing on a manuscript source unfortunately identified only as `Koyré-Archiv, Paris', the author records the little-known and rather sad attempted entrée of this Russian-born scholar into philosophy before converting himself into a world-renowned historian of science. He spent a few years around 1910 in Göttingen preparing `a logical study of set theory' (p. 223) as a doctoral thesis under Edmund Husserl (1859-1928). It was a fine time to be there: the author mentions several philosophers and mathematicians, and could have added Hermann Weyl (then himself a doctoral student under Hilbert) and the Polish philosopher Leon Chwistek, both of whom were influenced by a series of lectures given in 1909 by Poincaré (p. 211, where reference should have been given to \textit{H. Poincaré}'s resulting publication, Sechs Vorträge über ausgewählte Gegenstände, Leipzig and Berlin (Teubner)). But in the end Husserl rejected the thesis, and Koyré moved onto other things. The change may have been for the best, since apparently he thought that Cantor's set theory was `definitely consistent', so that Zermelo's axiomatisation was `entirely unnecessary' (p. 213). It is a great pity that nobody on the editorial board of this journal bothered to convert the author's opening summary into proper English. And somebody should have noted that `[Levy 1936-1937]' (p. 216) is absent from the bibliography.