I really enjoy Saunders MacLane's Mathematics Form and Function for sight at the "answers" this article seeks. MacLane's argument is that mathematics arises fro

I really enjoy Saunders MacLane's Mathematics Form and Function for sight at the "answers" this article seeks. MacLane's argument is that mathematics arises from a relatively small number of meaningful forces and "good" mathematics arises when those forces all align in particular places. You could of course go further by asking what exactly it is that makes those forces all align—why in these fields?—but the point of his book isn't exactly to answer the philosophical question but more to provide a little bit of a humanistic POV on the development of mathematics with just enough historical happenstance stripped away to make things intelligible but not so much as to lose the line of sight on why things (probably) developed the way that they did.