GÖdel, Kurt(1906–1978)
Kurt Gödel, a logician, was born in Brno, in what is now the Czech Republic, and educated at the University of Vienna, where he became privatdozent in 1933. In 1940 he joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he remained for the rest of his career. Following David Hilbert, Gödel was instrumental in establishing mathematical logic as a fundamental branch of mathematics, achieving results such as the incompleteness theorems that have had a profound impact on twentieth-century thought. In philosophy, by contrast, he represents the path not taken. Of his few writings in this area, including posthumous publications, those that focus on the more immediate ramifications of his own (and closely related) mathematical work have had the greatest impact.
GÖdel's Influence
A close student of the history of philosophy, Gödel follows Plato, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and Edmund Husserl as opposed to the more fashionable Aristotle, Immanual Kant, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. (On Kant, however, see Gödel 1946/9 and 1961.) Methodologically, two patterns in his thinking stand out. First, a tendency to move from the possible to the actual is reflected in his Leibnizian ontological argument for the existence of god (Gödel 1970). He relies here on the S5 modal principle, (possibly necessarily P ⊃ necessarily P).
This page contains 201 words.
Gödel, Kurt (1906–1978) article
Read the rest of this article.
This article contains 1,957 words
(approx. 7 pages at 300 words per page).
Order our Kurt Gödel Article
