Comparing material and structural set theories

Abstract

We study elementary theories of well-pointed toposes and pretoposes, regarded as category-theoretic or "structural" set theories in the spirit of Lawvere's "Elementary Theory of the Category of Sets". We consider weak intuitionistic and predicative theories of pretoposes, and we also propose category-theoretic versions of stronger axioms such as unbounded separation, replacement, and collection. Finally, we compare all of these theories formally to traditional membership-based or "material" set theories, using a version of the classical construction based on internal well-founded relations.