Abstract
In his text ‘The modern development of the foundations of mathematics in the light of philosophy’ from around 1961, Gödel announces a turn to Husserl’s phenomenology to find the foundations of mathematics. In Gödel’s archive there are two draft letters that shed some further light on the exact strategy that he formulated for himself in the early 1960s. Transcriptions of these letters are presented, together with some comments.
Originally published as van Atten 2006. Copyright © 2006 Oxford University Press. Reprinted by permission, which is gratefully acknowledged.
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Notes
- 1.
Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Firestone Library, Princeton University.
- 2.
After this word, crossed out: ‘thin[[king]]’.
- 3.
After this word, crossed out: ‘action’.
- 4.
Stricken insertion: ‘and realities’.
- 5.
After this word, crossed out: ‘reality &’.
- 6.
Above this mark, Gödel had written and then crossed out: ‘about reality and all being’. Also ‘reality’ and ‘about reality’ occur at this position and are crossed out. See also Footnote 7.
- 7.
Although the insertion mark
does not occur in version 1, it seems this text should be inserted where that version has the mark \(\bigvee\).
- 8.
No separate text to be inserted here was found, but it would fit if Gödel here meant to have the phrase ‘basic ideas’ that appears immediately after the mark ‘
’ in the main part.
- 9.
After this word, crossed out: ‘or even demonstrable’.
- 10.
After this word, crossed out: ‘merely’.
- 11.
‘Finite strings’ is a replacement for ‘[shapes]’. The final part originally read: ‘formulæ[[,]] which are considered as physical shapes of symb[[ols]] without meaning’.
- 12.
After this word, crossed out: ‘refere[[nce]]’.
- 13.
After this word, crossed out: ‘certain’, then ‘some’.
- 14.
Here the draft breaks off in mid-sentence.
- 15.
After this word, ‘various’ has been crossed out.
- 16.
After this word, ‘moreover these intuitions are not ineducable’ has been crossed out.
- 17.
After this, various attempts at a closing formula have all been crossed out. The last and most complete one of them reads ‘I’ll be very glad to give you further explan[[ations]] as far as I am able. Sinc[[erely]]’.
- 18.
References
van Atten, M. (2002). Why Husserl should have been a strong revisionist in mathematics. Husserl Studies, 18(1), 1–18.
van Atten, M. (2006). Two draft letters from Gödel on self-knowledge of reason. Philosophia Mathematica, 14(2), 255–261. Included in this volume as Chap. 8.
van Atten, M., & Kennedy, J. (2003). On the philosophical development of Kurt Gödel. Bulletin of Symbolic Logic, 9(4), 425–476. Included in this volume as Chap. 6.
Bergamini, D., and the editors of Life. (1963). Mathematics. New York: Time.
Gödel, K. Papers. Firestone Library, Princeton. Most citations are of the form ‘Gödel Papers box/folder, item number’.
Gödel, K. (1995). Unpublished essays and lectures (Collected works, Vol. 3; S. Feferman, J. Dawson, Jr., S. Kleene, G. Moore, R. Solovay, & J. van Heijenoort, Eds.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Husserl, E. (1976a). Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie: Erstes Buch. 1. Halbband: Text der 1.–3. Auflage (Husserliana, Vol. 3/1; K. Schuhmann, Ed.). Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff.
Kennedy, J., & van Atten, M. (2004). Gödel’s modernism: on set-theoretic incompleteness. In Essays on the history of the philosophy of mathematics. Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, 25(2), 289–349.
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Acknowledgements
In the person of Marcia Tucker, I thank the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton for giving permission to publish the text of Gödel’s two draft letters. Thanks also to the helpful staff at the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Firestone Library, Princeton University. I am grateful to Juliette Kennedy and Pierre Cassou-Noguès for checking my transcriptions, and to them, Georg Kreisel, and Rick Tieszen for comments on an earlier version.
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van Atten, M. (2015). Two Draft Letters from Gödel on Self-Knowledge of Reason. In: Essays on Gödel’s Reception of Leibniz, Husserl, and Brouwer. Logic, Epistemology, and the Unity of Science, vol 35. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10031-9_8
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