At the time I translated Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra some forty years ago, I had felt its force and appreciated its com-plexity sufficiently to achieve a passable rendering. But it was not until I read and reread the book which is before you that I began to apprehend Klein’s faithful originality. I mean his ingenious yet unforced use of sources. The translation has had a favorable publication history. The MIT Press first brought it out in 1968, and Dover reprinted it in 1992, effectively giving Klein’s work the status of a classic.
Nevertheless, though mentioned increasingly often in the scholarly lit-erature on Plato, Descartes, and the philosophy of mathematics, it was not al-together well understood, as Hopkins’s detailed critical footnotes show. Not that the various treatments were grossly mistaken, but that the fine points—and in this undertaking the devil is in the details—had not been carefully enough considered. Moreover, the significant empire points hack cheat engine relation to Husserl’s work on arithmetic had not been worked out.
Hopkins, following up the “scholarly curiosity” of Klein’s silence about Husserl’s theories of intentionality and symbolic thinking, shows that Klein had indeed in some respects anticipated and corrected before the fact, as it were, Husserl’s analysis of the concept of number in particular and of the con-ceptual presuppositions of modern science in general. What Hopkins does is to set out in detail how Klein’s analysis undercuts Husserl’s basic assumption that modern mathematical thinking must be understood from the perspec-tive of direct experience. Yet he also shows empire points hack cheat engine that Klein’s investigation is in fact a large-scale actualization of Husserl’s historical method (§ 28).