Aspects of “Anschauung” in the Work of Felix Klein

2018

Aimed at modernizing the teaching of mathematics at German secondary schools around 1900, The “Kleinian Reform Movement” was characterized by Felix Klein’s two key demands: “strengthening spatial intuition” and “training the habit of functional reasoning”. This paper presents a number of examples demonstrating the importance of the concept of intuition (Anschauung) for Klein and explains the role he assigned to intuition in mathematics instruction at school and university.