The author rejects the opinion that Kant’s views on mathematics lend in any interesting sense support to constructivism, understood as the thesis that the truth conditions of mathematical propositions consist in the existence of their constructive proofs or in the possibility of proving them constructively. Kant’s insistence on the role of intuitive construction in mathematics is here interpreted as a thesis concerning mathematical concepts, not mathematical objects, and therefore not in any sense implying that the objects of mathematical cognition cannot (...) be interpreted classically. (shrink)

The paper considers two—in author’s belief fundamental—approaches to apriority, which he proposes to call “absolute” and “relative.” The first was most fully expressed by Immanuel Kant, the second by Ludwig Wittgenstein. In author’s opinion, both derive from empiricist philosophy in its modern form. The concept of experience which is characteristic of modern empiricism forces acceptance of certain experienceindependent (a priori) assumptions, thanks to which only experience can provide information about objects. Depending on whether we regard these assumptions as independent of (...) all experience or only from a specific context and reference frame and empirical in other contexts, we receive respectively absolute and relative apriority. The author attempts to prove that relative apriority is the continuation, generalisation and radicalisation of the absolute variant. (shrink)