MUCH

Stopping at your favorite coffee shop on your way to work, after securing your caffeine dose, you pose the seemingly innocuous question ‘How much is it?’ at the counter. At that moment, you are not merely tallying the cost your wallet will bear. Instead, you are also engaged in a philosophical undertaking that extends far beyond simple arithmetic. In asking the bill, what is it that you are asking to quantify? Here lies a deeper and layered set of questions, at the crossroad between mathematics and philosophy. What is the relation between determining the quantity of an object and assessing its quantified existence? Is there any precise link between the way we perform mathematical calculations and the way we conceive of a quantified item? Or, analogously in an algebraic setting, What is it that allows us to relate a variable of an equation to a concrete object? It is MUCH’s contention that the very conceptual possibility of asking such questions rests on the key philosophical notion of quantity, as shaped by the intersection of philosophical reflections and mathematical practices between the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Shedding light on the conceptual nuances of these problems must go through a conceptual genealogy and a careful historical and conceptual analysis. MUCH targets the questions above by focusing on the pure philosophical and historical outset of this pervasive issue: pre-modern European culture and the unprecedented intertwinement of three key conceptual features, i.e., quantum, abstraction, and unknown.