Categories within the Foundation of Mathematics

Benjamin Horowitz

Published 2013-12-21Version 1

The recent trend in mathematics is towards a framework of abstract mathematical objects, rather than the more concrete approach of explicitly defining elements which objects were thought to consist of. A natural question to raise is whether this sort of abstract approach advocated for by Lawvere, among others, is foundational in the sense that it provides a unified, universal, system of first order axioms in which we can define the usual mathematical objects and prove their usual properties. In this way, we view the ``foundation" as something without any necessary justification or starting point. Some of the main arguments for categories as such a structure are laid out by MacLane as he argues that the set-theoretic constructions are inappropriate for current mathematics as practices, and that they are inadequate to properly encompass category theory itself and therefore cannot properly encompass all of mathematics, while category theory can be used to describe set theory and all the natural consequences of a given primitive system.