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There's Something About Goedel Francesco Berto (Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Italy)

There's Something About Goedel By Francesco Berto (Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Italy)

There's Something About Goedel by Francesco Berto (Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Italy)


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Summary

There's Something About Godel is a lucid and accessible guide to Godel's revolutionary Incompleteness Theorem , considered one of the most astounding argumentative sequences in the history of human thought. It is also an exploration of the most controversial alleged philosophical outcomes of the Theorem.

There's Something About Goedel Summary

There's Something About Goedel: The Complete Guide to the Incompleteness Theorem by Francesco Berto (Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Italy)

Berto's highly readable and lucid guide introduces students and the interested reader to Goedel's celebrated Incompleteness Theorem, and discusses some of the most famous - and infamous - claims arising from Goedel's arguments.

  • Offers a clear understanding of this difficult subject by presenting each of the key steps of the Theorem in separate chapters
  • Discusses interpretations of the Theorem made by celebrated contemporary thinkers
  • Sheds light on the wider extra-mathematical and philosophical implications of Goedel's theories
  • Written in an accessible, non-technical style

There's Something About Goedel Reviews

This is a beautifully clear and accurate presentation of the material, with no technical demands beyond what is required for accuracy, and filled with interesting philosophical suggestions. (John Woods, University of British Columbia)

There's Something about Godel is a bargain: two books in one. The first half is a gentle but rigorous introduction to the incompleteness theorems for the mathematically uninitiated. The second is a survey of the philosophical, psychological, and sociological consequences people have attempted to derive from the theorems, some of them quite fantastical. (Philosophia Mathematica, 2011)

There is a story that in 1930 the great mathematician John von Neumann emerged from a seminar delivered by Kurt Goedel saying: 'It's all over.' Goedel had just proved the two theorems about the logical foundations of mathematics that are the subject of this valuable new book by Francesco Berto. Berto's clear exposition and his strategy of dividing the proof into short, easily digestible chunks make it pleasant reading ... .Berto is lucid and witty in exposing mistaken applications of Goedel's results ... [and] has provided a thoroughly recommendable guide to Goedel's theorems and their current status within, and outside, mathematical logic. (Times Higher Education Supplement, February 2010)

About Francesco Berto (Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Italy)

Francesco Berto teaches logic, ontology, and philosophy of mathematics at the universities of Aberdeen in Scotland, and Venice and Milan-San Raffaele in Italy. He holds a Chaire d'Excellence fellowship at CNRS in Paris, where he has taught ontology at the Ecole Normale Superieure, and he is a visiting professor at the Institut Wiener Kreis of the University of Vienna. He has written papers for American Philosophical Quarterly, Dialectica, The Philosophical Quarterly, the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, the European Journal of Philosophy, Philosophia Mathematica, Logique et Analyse, and Metaphysica, and runs the entries Dialetheism and Impossible Worlds in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. His book How to Sell a Contradiction has won the 2007 Castiglioncello prize for the best philosophical book by a young philosopher.

Table of Contents

Prologue.

Acknowledgments.

Part I: The Goedelian Symphony.

1 Foundations and Paradoxes.

1 This sentence is false.

2 The Liar and Goedel.

3 Language and metalanguage.

4 The axiomatic method, or how to get the non-obvious out of the obvious.

5 Peano's axioms ... .

6 ... and the unsatisfied logicists, Frege and Russell.

7 Bits of set theory.

8 The Abstraction Principle.

9 Bytes of set theory.

10 Properties, relations, functions, that is, sets again.

11 Calculating, computing, enumerating, that is, the notion of algorithm.

12 Taking numbers as sets of sets.

13 It's raining paradoxes.

14 Cantor's diagonal argument.

15 Self-reference and paradoxes.

2 Hilbert.

1 Strings of symbols.

2 ... in mathematics there is no ignorabimus.

3 Goedel on stage.

4 Our first encounter with the Incompleteness Theorem ... .

5 ... and some provisos.

3 Goedelization, or Say It with Numbers!

1 TNT.

2 The arithmetical axioms of TNT and the standard model N.

3 The Fundamental Property of formal systems.

4 The Goedel numbering ... .

5 ... and the arithmetization of syntax.

4 Bits of Recursive Arithmetic ... .

1 Making algorithms precise.

2 Bits of recursion theory.

3 Church's Thesis.

4 The recursiveness of predicates, sets, properties, and relations.

5 ... And How It Is Represented in Typographical Number Theory.

1 Introspection and representation.

2 The representability of properties, relations, and functions ... .

3 ... and the Goedelian loop.

6 I Am Not Provable.

1 Proof pairs.

2 The property of being a theorem of TNT (is not recursive!)

3 Arithmetizing substitution.

4 How can a TNT sentence refer to itself?

5

6 Fixed point.

7 Consistency and omega-consistency.

8 Proving G1.

9 Rosser's proof.

7 The Unprovability of Consistency and the Immediate Consequences of G1 and G2.

1 G2.

2 Technical interlude.

3 Immediate consequences of G1 and G2.

4 Undecidable1 and undecidable2.

5 Essential incompleteness, or the syndicate of mathematicians.

6 Robinson Arithmetic.

7 How general are Goedel's results?

8 Bits of Turing machine.

9 G1 and G2 in general.

10 Unexpected fish in the formal net.

11 Supernatural numbers.

12 The culpability of the induction scheme.

13 Bits of truth (not too much of it, though).

Part II: The World after Goedel.

8 Bourgeois Mathematicians! The Postmodern Interpretations.

1 What is postmodernism?

2 From Goedel to Lenin.

3 Is Biblical proof decidable?

4 Speaking of the totality.

5 Bourgeois teachers!

6 (Un)interesting bifurcations.

9 A Footnote to Plato.

1 Explorers in the realm of numbers.

2 The essence of a life.

3 The philosophical prejudices of our times.

4 From Goedel to Tarski.

5 Human, too human.

10 Mathematical Faith.

1 I'm not crazy!

2 Qualified doubts.

3 From Gentzen to the Dialectica interpretation.

4 Mathematicians are people of faith.

11 Mind versus Computer: Goedel and Artificial Intelligence.

1 Is mind (just) a program?

2 Seeing the truth and going outside the system.

3 The basic mistake.

4 In the haze of the transfinite.

5 Know thyself: Socrates and the inexhaustibility of mathematics.

12 Goedel versus Wittgenstein and the Paraconsistent Interpretation.

1 When geniuses meet ... .

2 The implausible Wittgenstein.

3 There is no metamathematics.

4 Proof and prose.

5 The single argument.

6 But how can arithmetic be inconsistent?

7 The costs and benefits of making Wittgenstein plausible.

Epilogue.

References.

Index.

Additional information

NLS9781405197670
9781405197670
1405197676
There's Something About Goedel: The Complete Guide to the Incompleteness Theorem by Francesco Berto (Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Italy)
New
Paperback
John Wiley and Sons Ltd
2009-11-06
256
N/A
Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
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