Russell: The Journal of Bertrand Russell Archives

72 Russell summer 1989 Introducing Kurt Godel by Billy Joe Lucas Kurt G6del. Collected Works. Volume I: Publications 1929-1936. Ed. Solomon Feferman (Ed.-in-chief), John W. Dawson, Jr., Stephen C. Kleene, Gregory H. Moore, Robert M. Solovay, and Jean van Heijenoort. Prepared under the auspices of the Association for Symbolic Logic. New York: Oxford University Press; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. Pp. xvi, 474. US$35.00. EVALUATING RussELL's CONTRIBUTIONS to logic, his applications of logic, and his views on the nature of logic and on the relationship of logic to philosophy invQlves answering some serious questions concerning twentiethcentury logic, logic both as Russell knew it and as it has evolved since Russell made his contributions. As G6del is second only to Russell among contributors to logic in the first half of this century, our understanding of Russell will thus be incomplete until we come to appreciate fully the work of Kurt G6del. Understanding G6del is a task that should become easier for most Russell students now that G6del's collected works are being published in English translation . Volume I contains, or rather was intended to contain (see Section VI below), all of G6del's writings published in the period 1929-1936. Volume II is to contain the remainder of G6del's published works. Subsequent volumes are to contain his "unpublished manuscripts, lectures, lecture notes, and correspondence , as well as extracts from his scientific notebooks." Except for his 1934 lectures on undecidability (which were published originally in English), all of G6del's publications as of 1936 were in German. G6del's German texts are printed on left-hand pages, with English translations on the facing pages. Except for his dissertation, original pagination is retained in margin notes, and occasional footnotes (mostly G6del's) are located at the bottom of the page. There are 490 numbered pages in this book. In English, the works of G6del collected in this volume total approximately 145 pages, or thirty percent of the total. G6del's works, in German, come to another 119 pages; G6del's writings thus comprise about fifty-four percent of the printed material. The section titled "Textual Notes" occupies only five pages, and fails to mention that G6del's citations of publications have been altered, sometimes both in German originals and in the translations thereof, to conform to the style used by other contributors to this volume. This is mentioned in a four-page section.titled, "Information for the Reader:" The only index is a fourteen-page index of names of persons, places, and publications that fails to differentiate between occurrences of names in G6del's writings and occurrences in the writings of Reviews 73 the other authors included in this volume. Dawson's seven-page G6del chronology is superior to any of the Russell chronologies I have seen, and should prove useful for Russell scholars who wish to integrate the sequence ofevents in G6del's life into their image of the sequential flow of Russell's life and work. Readers with skill at reading photographs will take pleasure in the six wellreproduced photos contained in this volume. These are not listed in the table of contents; one occurs opposite the title-page, and the others between pages 15 and 16. The third largest portion of this book, after the 145 pages of G6del in English and the 119 pages of G6del in German, is the approximately seventy-eight pages comprised of nineteen introductory notes to some thirty-five of the fifty-six works of G6del collected in this volume. These nineteen introductory notes, easily distinguished from G6del's text by the occurrence of a vertical line down the outside margin, were written by the following eleven authors: two are by John W. Dawson, Jr.; one is co-authored by Burton Dreben and Jean van Heijenoort ; one is by Solomon Feferman; one is by Warren D. Goldfarb; three are by Stephen C. Kleene; one is by Rohit Parikh; five are by W.V. Quine; three are by A.S. Troelstra; one is by Robert L. Vaught; and one is by Judson Webb. Solomon Feferman has contributed a thirty-six page essay, "G6del's Life and Work," some fourteen pages...