The philosophical background of Weyl's mathematical constructivism (Q2701938)

The author traces the philosophical background of Weyl's constructivism, as it appears in his \textit{Das Kontinuum} [Veit u. Co., Leipzig (1918; JFM 46.0056.11)] and a few of his papers, and finds that among the German idealists he was influenced by Kant and Fichte (the role of consciousness in the constitution of knowledge), among contemporaries by Husserl, where the insistence upon intuition and meaning may be traced back to. He notes the extent to which Weyl did agree with Brouwer in his construction of the continuum, which --- unlike Weyl's own theory of the continuum, whose main advantage he sees in its sufficiency for applications to physics (a claim largely confirmed in the 80 years that followed) --- reflects the actual intuitions of flow and duration, as well as Weyl's later attempts to do justice to the \textit{symbolic} aspect in mathematics, which he saw represented by the axiomatic formalisation advocated by his teacher Hilbert.