After browsing Leibnitz' Monadology (Roger, thanks for the link), I have
checked what else is available on marxists.org. It happens that marxists
have quite a nice library available. I have even found an interesting
paper of Gödel. There he claims that Husserl will help us to find out
what mathematics is.
Evgenii
Kurt Gödel (1961)
The modern development of the foundations of mathematics in the light of
philosophy
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/at/godel.htm
"In what manner, however, is it possible to extend our knowledge of
these abstract concepts, i.e., to make these concepts themselves precise
and to gain comprehensive and secure insight into the fundamental
relations that subsist among them, i.e., into the axioms that hold for
them? Obviously not, or in any case not exclusively, by trying to give
explicit definitions for concepts and proofs for axioms, since for that
one obviously needs other undefinable abstract concepts and axioms
holding for them. Otherwise one would have nothing from which one could
define or prove. The procedure must thus consist, at least to a large
extent, in a clarification of meaning that does not consist in giving
definitions."
"Now in fact, there exists today the beginning of a science which claims
to possess a systematic method for such a clarification of meaning, and
that is the phenomenology founded by Husserl. Here clarification of
meaning consists in focusing more sharply on the concepts concerned by
directing our attention in a certain way, namely, onto our own acts in
the use of these concepts, onto our powers in carrying out our acts,
etc. But one must keep clearly in mind that this phenomenology is not a
science in the same sense as the other sciences. Rather it is or in any
case should be a procedure or technique that should produce in us a new
state of consciousness in which we describe in detail the basic concepts
we use in our thought, or grasp other basic concepts hitherto unknown to
us. I believe there is no reason at all to reject such a procedure at
the outset as hopeless. Empiricists, of course, have the least reason of
all to do so, for that would mean that their empiricism is, in truth, an
apriorism with its sign reversed."
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