Halfway Up To the Mathematical Infinity: On the Ontological and Epistemic Sustainability of Georg Cantor's Transfinite Design

Abstract

Georg Cantor was the genuine discoverer of the Mathematical Infinity, and whatever he claimed, suggested, or even surmised should be taken seriously -- albeit not necessary at its face value. Because alongside his exquisite in beauty ordinal construction and his fundamental powerset description of the continuum, Cantor has also left to us his obsessive presumption that the universe of sets should be subjected to laws similar to those governing the set of natural numbers, including the universal principles of cardinal comparability and well-ordering -- and implying an ordinal re-creation of the continuum. During the last hundred years, the mainstream set-theoretical research -- all insights and adjustments due to Kurt Gödel's revolutionary insights and discoveries notwithstanding -- has compliantly centered its efforts on \emph{ad hoc} axiomatizations of Cantor's intuitive transfinite design. We demonstrate here that the ontological and epistemic \emph{sustainability} of this design has been irremediably compromised by the underlying it peremptory, Reductionist mindset of the XIXth century's ideology of science.