William Rowan Hamilton and Kant

A view of the bridge at Broombridge, featuring the plaque commemorating the discovery of quaternions by Hamilton.

I have written before about Hamilton’s interest in philosophy, particularly Berkeley and idealism. This post will give some detail of William Rowan Hamilton’s interest in and understanding of Kant.

In this post on the discovery of quaternions I mentioned that the project which had his children asking each morning “Well, Papa, can you multiply triplets”? started with a paper : “Theory of Conjugate Functions, or Algebraic Couples; with a Preliminary and Elementary Essay on Algebra as the Science of Pure Time”, read to the Royal Irish Academy on November 4th, 1833, and June 1st, 1835, and published in 1837 (pdf from TCD).

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