Kurt Gödel (1906–1978) with his work on the constructible universe L established the relative consistency of the Axiom of Choice (AC) and the Continuum Hypothesis (CH). More broadly, he ensured the ascendancy of first-order logic as the framework and a matter of method for set theory and secured the cumulative hierarchy view of the universe of sets. Gödel thereby transformed set theory and launched it with structured subject matter and specific methods of proof. In later years Gödel worked on a variety of settheoretic constructions and speculated about how problems might be settled with new axioms. We here chronicle this development from the point of view of the evolution of set theory as a field of mathematics. Much has been written, of course, about Gödel's work in set theory, from textbook expositions to the introductory notes to his collected papers. The present account presents an integrated view of the historical and mathematical development as supported by his recently published lectures and correspondence. Beyond the surface of things we delve deeper into the mathematics. What emerges are the roots and anticipations in work of Russell and Hilbert, and most prominently the sustained motif of truth as formalizable in the “next higher system”. We especially work at bringing out how transforming Gödel's work was for set theory. It is difficult now to see what conceptual and technical distance Gödel had to cover and how dramatic his re-orientation of set theory was.

The philosopher Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970), although not himself an originator of mathematical advances in logic, was much involved in the development of the subject. He was the most important and deepest philosopher of the Vienna Circle of logical positivists, or, to use the label Carnap later preferred, logical empiricists. It was Carnap who gave the most fully developed and sophisticated form to the linguistic doctrine of logical and mathematical truth: the view that the truths of mathematics and logic do not describe some Platonistic realm, but rather are artifacts of the way we establish a language in which to speak of the factual, empirical world, fallouts of the representational capacity of language. (This view has its roots in Wittgenstein's Tractatus, but Wittgenstein's remarks on mathematics beyond first-order logic are notoriously sparse and cryptic.) Carnap was also the thinker who, after Russell, most emphasized the importance of modern logic, and the distinctive advances it enables in the foundations of mathematics, to contemporary philosophy. It was through Carnap's urgings, abetted by Hans Hahn, once Carnap arrived in Vienna as Privatdozent in philosophy in 1926, that the Vienna Circle began to take logic seriously and that positivist philosophy began to grapple with the question of how an account of mathematics compatible with empiricism can be given (see Goldfarb 1996).

A particular facet of Carnap's influence is not widely appreciated: it was Carnap who introduced Kurt Gödel to logic, in the serious sense.

There are some puzzles about Gödel's published and unpublished remarks concerning finitism that have led some commentators to believe that his conception of it was unstable, that he oscillated back and forth between different accounts of it. I want to discuss these puzzles and argue that, on the contrary, Gödel's writings represent a smooth evolution, with just one rather small double-reversal, of his view of finitism. He used the term “finit” (in German) or “finitary” or “finitistic” primarily to refer to Hilbert's conception of finitary mathematics. On two occasions (only, as far as I know), the lecture notes for his lecture at Zilsel's (Gödel [*1938a]) and the lecture notes for a lecture at Yale (Gödel [*1941]), he used it in a way that he knew—in the second case, explicitly—went beyond what Hilbert meant.

Early in his career, he believed that finitism (in Hilbert's sense) is openended, in the sense that no correct formal system can be known to formalize all finitist proofs and, in particular, all possible finitist proofs of consistency of first-order number theory, PA; but starting in the Dialectica paper Gödel [1958], he expressed in writing the view that ε0 is an upper bound on the finitist ordinals, and that, therefore, the consistency of PA, cannot be finitistically proved. Although I do not understand the “therefore” (see §8 below), here was a genuine change in his views.

Abstract. Two young logicians, whose work had a dramatic impact on the direction of logic, exchanged two letters in early 1931. Jacques Herbrand initiated the correspondence on 7 April and Kurt Gödel responded on 25 July, just two days before Herbrand died in a mountaineering accident at La Bérarde (Isère). Herbrand's letter played a significant role in the development of computability theory. Gödel asserted in his 1934 Princeton Lectures and on later occasions that it suggested to him a crucial part of the definition of a general recursive function. Understanding this role in detail is of great interest as the notion is absolutely central. The full text of the letter had not been available until recently, and its content (as reported by Gödel) was not in accord with Herbrand's contemporaneous published work. Together, the letters reflect broader intellectual currents of the time: they are intimately linked to the discussion of the incompleteness theorems and their potential impact on Hilbert's Program.

Introduction. Two important papers in mathematical logic were published in 1931, one by Jacques Herbrand in the Journal für reine und angewandte Mathematik and the other by Kurt Gödel in the Monatshefte für Mathematik und Physik. At age 25, Gödel was Herbrand's elder by just two years. Their work dramatically impacted investigations in mathematical logic, but also became central for theoretical computer science as that subject evolved in the fifties and sixties.

The best known and most widely discussed aspect of Kurt Gödel's philosophy of mathematics is undoubtedly his robust realism or platonism about mathematical objects and mathematical knowledge. This has scandalized many philosophers but probably has done so less in recent years than earlier. Bertrand Russell's report in his autobiography of one or more encounters with Gödel is well known:

On this Gödel commented:

One of the tasks I shall undertake here is to say something about what Gödel's platonism is and why he held it.

A feature of Gödel's view is the manner in which he connects it with a strong conception of mathematical intuition, strong in the sense that it appears to be a basic epistemological factor in knowledge of highly abstract mathematics, in particular higher set theory. Other defenders of intuition in the foundations of mathematics, such as Brouwer and the traditional intuitionists, have a much more modest conception of what mathematical intuition will accomplish.

Abstract. The metamathematical tradition that developed from Hilbert's program is based on syntactic characterizations of mathematics and the use of explicit, finitary methods in the metatheory. Although Gödel's work in logic fits squarely in that tradition, one often finds him curiously at odds with the associated methodological orientation. This essay explores that tension and what lies behind it.

§1. Introduction. While I am honored to have been asked to deliver a lecture in honor of the Kurt Gödel centennial, I agreed to do so with some hesitations. For one thing, I am not a historian, so if you are expecting latebreaking revelations from the Gödel Nachlass you will be disappointed. A more pressing concern is that I am a poor representative of Gödel's views. As a proof theorist by training and disposition, I take myself to be working in the metamathematical tradition that emerged from Hilbert's program; while I will point out, in this essay, that Gödel's work in logic falls squarely in this tradition, one often senses in Gödel a dissatisfaction with that methodological orientation that makes me uneasy. This is by no means to deny Gödel's significance; von Neumann once characterized him as the most important logician since Aristotle, and I will not dispute that characterization here. But admiration does not always translate to a sense of affinity, and I sometimes have a hard time identifying with Gödel's outlook.

Gödel has emphasized the important role that his philosophical views had played in his discoveries. Thus, in a letter to Hao Wang of December 7, 1967, explaining why Skolem and others had not obtained the completeness theorem for predicate calculus, Gödel wrote:

In a similar vein, Gödel has maintained that the “realist” or “Platonist” position regarding sets and the transfinite with which he is identified was part of his belief system from his student days. This can be seen in Gödel's replies to the detailed questionnaire prepared by Burke Grandjean in 1974. Gödel prepared three tentative mutually consistent replies, but sent none of them.

§1. Introduction. It is by now well known that Gödel first advocated the philosophy of Leibniz and then, since 1959, that of Husserl. This raises three questions:

1. How is this turn to Husserl to be interpreted? Is it a dismissal of the Leibnizian philosophy, or a different way to achieve similar goals?

2. Why did Gödel turn specifically to the later Husserl's transcendental idealism?

3. Is there any detectable influence from Husserl on Gödel's writings?

Regarding the first question, Wang reports that Gödel ‘[saw] in Husserl's work a method of refining and consolidating Leibniz' monadology’. But what does this mean? In what for Gödel relevant sense is Husserl's work a refinement and consolidation of Leibniz' monadology?

The second question is particularly pressing, given that Gödel was, by his own admission, a realist in mathematics since 1925. Wouldn't the uncompromising realism of the early Husserl's Logical investigations have been a more obvious choice for a Platonist like Gödel?

The third question can only be approached when an answer to the second has been given, and we want to suggest that the answer to the first question follows from the answer to the second. We begin, therefore, with a closer look at the actual turn towards phenomenology.

Some 30 years before his serious study of Husserl began, Gödel was well aware of the existence of phenomenology. Apart from its likely appearance in the philosophy courses that Gödel took, it reached him from various directions.

Abstract. As initially envisioned, Gödel's Collected Works were to include transcriptions of material from his mathematical workbooks. In the end that material, as well as some other manuscript items from Gödel's Nachlass, had to be left out. This note describes some of the unpublished items in the Nachlass that are likely to attract the notice of scholars and surveys the extent of shorthand transcription efforts undertaken hitherto. Some examples of sources outside Gödel's Nachlass that may be of interest to Gödel scholars are also indicated.

At the time the Gödel Editorial Project began in the summer of 1982 the cataloguing of Gödel's Nachlass had only just begun. Nevertheless, despite limited knowledge of the extent of that collection, enthusiasm and expectations were high: Volume I of Gödel's Collected Works, which appeared four years later, confidently declared that “Succeeding volumes are to contain Gödel's … lecture notes, as well as extracts from his scientific notebooks.”

In the end, volume III of those Works, devoted to previously unpublished essays and lectures, contained the texts of a number of individual lectures that Gödel gave on various occasions, as well as those of several manuscripts that he left in relatively finished form, including some items transcribed from his Gabelsberger shorthand. But none of the five volumes ultimately published contain any of the notes that Gödel prepared for his lecture courses at the University of Vienna or at Notre Dame, nor any extracts from the three series of notebooks he compiled on mathematics and philosophy.

§1. I propose to address not so much Gödel's own philosophy of mathematics as the philosophical implications of his work, and especially of his incompleteness theorems. Now the phrase “philosophical implications of Gödel's theorem” suggests different things to different people. To professional logicians it may summon up thoughts of the impact of the incompleteness results on Hilbert's program. To the general public, if it calls up any thoughts at all, these are likely to be of the attempt by Lucas [1961] and Penrose [1989] to prove, if not the immortality of the soul, then at least the non-mechanical nature of mind. One goal of my present remarks will be simply to point out a significant connection between these two topics.

But let me consider each separately a bit first, starting with Hilbert. As is well known, though Brouwer's intuitionism was what provoked Hilbert's program, the real target of Hilbert's program was Kronecker's finitism, which had inspired objections to the Hilbert basis theorem early in Hilbert's career. (See the account in Reid [1970].) But indeed Hilbert himself and his followers (and perhaps his opponents as well) did not initially perceive very clearly just how far Brouwer was willing go beyond anything that Kronecker would have accepted. Finitism being his target, Hilbert made it his aim to convince the finitist, for whom no mathematical statements more complex than universal generalizations whose every instance can be verified by computation are really meaningful, of the value of “meaningless” classical mathematics as an instrument for establishing such statements.

The final two volumes, numbers IV and V, of the Oxford University Press edition of the Collected Works of Kurt Gödel appeared in 2003, thus completing a project that started over twenty years earlier. What I mainly want to do here is trace, from the vantage point of my personal involvement, the at some times halting and at other times intense development of the Gödel editorial project from the first initiatives following Gödel's death in 1978 to its completion last year. It may be useful to scholars mounting similar editorial projects for other significant figures in our field to learn how and why various decisions were made and how the work was carried out, though of course much is particular to who and what we were dealing with.

My hope here is also to give the reader who is not already familiar with the Gödel Works a sense of what has been gained in the process, and to encourage dipping in according to interest. Given the absolute importance of Gödel for mathematical logic, students should also be pointed to these important source materials to experience first hand the exercise of his genius and the varied ways of his thought and to see how scholarly and critical studies help to expand their significance.

Though indeed much has been gained in our work there is still much that can and should be done; besides some indications below, for that the reader is referred to.

The incompleteness theorems show that for every sufficiently strong consistent formal system of mathematics there are mathematical statements undecided relative to the system. A natural and intriguing question is whether there are mathematical statements that are in some sense absolutely undecidable, that is, undecidable relative to any set of axioms that are justified. Gödel was quick to point out that his original incompleteness theorems did not produce instances of absolute undecidability and hence did not undermine Hilbert's conviction that for every precisely formulated mathematical question there is a definite and discoverable answer. However, in his subsequent work in set theory, Gödel uncovered what he initially regarded as a plausible candidate for an absolutely undecidable statement. Furthermore, he expressed the hope that one might actually prove this. Eventually he came to reject this view and, moving to the other extreme, expressed the hope that there might be a generalized completeness theorem according to which there are no absolutely undecidable sentences.

In this paper I would like to bring the question of absolute undecidability into sharper relief by bringing results in contemporary set theory to bear on it. The question is intimately connected with the nature of reason and the justification of new axioms and this is why it seems elusive and difficult. It is much easier to show that a statement is not absolutely undecidable than to show either that a statement is absolutely undecidable or that there are no absolutely undecidable statements.

Kurt Gödel is almost as famous—one might say “notorious”—for his extreme platonist views as he is famous for his mathematical theorems. Moreover his platonism is not a myth; it is well-documented in his writings. Here are two platonist declarations about set theory, the first from his paper about Bertrand Russell and the second from the revised version of his paper on the Continuum Hypotheses.

The first statement is a platonist declaration of a fairly standard sort concerning set theory. What is unusual in it is the inclusion of concepts among the objects of mathematics.

The year 2006 marked the centennial of Kurt Gödel, who was born on 28 April 1906. The importance of Gödel's work for nearly all areas of logic and foundations of mathematics hardly needs to be explained to our readers.

The year 2006 saw several centennial observances. In particular, the program committee for the 2006 Association for Symbolic Logic annual meeting, which took place on 17–21 May at the Université du Québec à Montréal, commissioned a subcommittee to arrange a portion of the program that would commemorate the Gödel centennial. The subcommittee arranged three one-hour lectures, by Jeremy Avigad, Sy-David Friedman, and Akihiro Kanamori. It also arranged a two-hour special session on Gödel's philosophy of mathematics, with lectures by Steve Awodey, John Burgess, and William Tait. All of the lectures have led to papers in this volume. The volume contains one other new paper, “The Gödel hierarchy and reverse mathematics,” by Stephen G. Simpson. Other papers included in the volume are reprinted, in all but one case from The Bulletin of Symbolic Logic. We have included the papers presented at the 2004 ASL annual meeting at Carnegie-Mellon University, in a special session organized by the editors of Gödel's Collected Works, by Martin Davis, John W. Dawson, Jr., Cheryl A. Dawson, Solomon Feferman, Warren Goldfarb, Donald A. Martin, Wilfried Sieg, and William Tait. These appeared in the June 2005 Bulletin. Also reprinted are papers by Mark van Atten and Juliette Kennedy and by Charles Parsons that appeared in earlier issues of the Bulletin, as well as a paper by Peter Koellner that appeared in Philosophia Mathematica.