In September 2000 the Arché Centre launched a five-year research project entitled
the Logical and Metaphysical Foundations of Classical Mathematics. Its
goal was to study the prospects, philosophical and technical, for abstractionist
foundations for the classical mathematical theories of the natural, real and
complex numbers and standard set theory. Funding was provided by the then
Arts and Humanities Research Board (now the Arts and Humanities Research
Council) for the appointment of full-time postdoctoral research fellows and
PhD students to collaborate with more senior colleagues in the project, and at
the same time the British Academy awarded the Centre additional resources
to establish an International Network of scholars to be associated with the
work. This was the beginning of the serial ‘Abstraction workshops’ of which
the Centre had staged no less than eleven by December 2006. We gratefully
acknowledge the generous support of the Academy and Council, sine
qua non