Abstract not found

Introduction The label "mathematical scepticism" was coined in Floridi [1998] to refer to the body of sceptical arguments developed against mathematical knowledge, its methodology and nature (e.g. its certainty, reliability, necessity etc.), and hence to a sceptical philosophy of mathematics, not to some form of "mathematised" scepticism. Little is known about mathematical scepticism in modern times. Imre Lakatos once remarked that "in discussing modern efforts to establish foundations for mathematical knowledge one tends to forget that these are but a chapter in the great effort to overcome scepticism by establishing foundations for knowledge in general" (Lakatos [1978], 4). And in a sense he was clearly right: modern thought---with its new discoveries in mathematical sciences, the mathematisation of physics, the spreading of sceptical doctrines, the centrality of epistemological foundationalism, the diffusion of the geometrical method in philosophy and the foundationalist cris