Claire Ortiz Hill

Thinking the Float Tank – Thursday, August 24, 2023 (Day 1)

Metaphysics Seizes Possession of Georg Cantor’s Soul, a Journey through His Psyche

Speaker Bio:

A native of Santa Fe, New Mexico, Claire Ortiz Hill is the author of several books and over 50 articles about the Austro-German roots of 20th century philosophy. She holds a doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Paris, Sorbonne as well as degrees from the University of California, Riverside. She has been a religious hermit with the Archdiocese of Paris for 40 years. Her books include Word and Object in Husserl, Frege and Russell; Rethinking Identity and Metaphysics; Husserl or Frege (with G. Rosado Haddock); The Roots and Flowers of Evil in Nietzsche, Baudelaire and Hitler; Facing the Light; The Road Not Taken (with J. da Silva); and the translations of Husserl’s Introduction to Logic and Theory of Knowledge and his Logic and General Theory of Science. 

Abstract: 

Georg Cantor, the finder of set theory and of the actual infinite, shaped both 20th century Continental and Anglo-American philosophy, which, from his fan Bertrand Russell on, was  anti-metaphysical and atheistic. Yet in 1894, Cantor “confessed” that metaphysics and theology had so seized his soul for over twenty years that mathematics was so little the essential love of his soul that he had relatively little time left over for it. Some work has been done on his interest in metaphysics and theology, but his contemporaneous commitment to occultism has been ignored. I am working to fill this gap so as to present a truer picture of the nature of his love of metaphysics and theology.