A partial scholarship was awarded to Bahram Assadian, for work on his PhD in the Department of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London. His thesis, entitled Displacing Numbers: On the Metaphysics of Mathematical Structuralism, investigates the nature and identity of numbers and other mathematical objects while also resuscitating Persian and especially Avicenna’s ‘discoveries on the logic of necessity’.
Thus the central aim of Bahram Assadian’s doctoral thesis is “to scrutinise some of the most philosophically interesting challenges that emerge out of this conception of natural numbers.”
“Is mathematics about distinctively mathematical entities such as the natural numbers, or is it about the ‘structures’ or ‘forms’ of such entities? This project has been centred on what is known as mathematical structuralism – the thesis that argues for the latter claim.”
By dealing with the philosophical challenges of numbers, this research also resuscitates Persian and especially Avicenna’s ‘discoveries on the logic of necessity’. Through its contribution to the philosophy of mathematics as understood by Ibn-e Sina (Avicenna), it sheds light on unduly neglected aspects of the Avicennian conception of the subject matter of mathematics and explains his account of mathematical objects and theories in structuralist settings.
These issues are discussed in six chapters which conclude “by outlining some of the applications of this alternative view to arithmetical platonism.”