Mathematicism is 'the effort to employ the formal structure and rigorous method of mathematics as a model for the conduct of philosophy',[1] or the epistemological view that reality is fundamentally mathematical.[2] The term has been applied to a number of philosophers, including Pythagoras[3] and René Descartes[4] although the term was not used by themselves.
The role of mathematics in Western philosophy has grown and expanded from Pythagoras onwards. It is clear that numbers held a particular importance for the Pythagorean school, although it was the later work of Plato that attracts the label of mathematicism from modern philosophers. Furthermore it is René Descartes who provides the first mathematical epistemology which he describes as a mathesis universalis, and which is also referred to as mathematicism.