Incompleteness

"The mathematician yearns for philosophy."

Here I'm quoting a great personal friend of mine, a mathematician and philosopher, who would make this remark early on in our friendship, noting how our conversations consistently drifted from mathematics (the subject we both share) to philosophy (his alone) and more often than not, the philosophy of mathematics. Rebecca Goldstein exposes beautifully the intrinsic links between the subjects and it is easy to see that all mathematicians are also philosophers, indeed whether or not they may realise it.

I came to this book looking for a biography of Kurt Gödel and an exposition of his most famous work. Goldstein delivers this while also providing tantalising philosophical insight into Gödel's time with the Vienna Circle and the far-reaching consequences of his work (most unexpected perhaps those on our understanding of the mind, with Roger Penrose believing -- not uncontroversially -- the inability to reduce the workings of the brain to a formal system to be a corollary of Gödel, in effect to absolutely distinguish thought from machine).

It's ironic, then, that I find myself being left so unsatisfied by this book. I got everything I came for, but the brief glimpses of what I apparently really wanted -- to the vindication of my friend -- have left me wishing desperately that Goldstein had leaned more heavily into those aspects. Short book as it is, there could be room for both.

It's not lost on me that I may be being wholly unfair. I picked up a biography and am disappointed in its focus on biography. Incompleteness is everything it says on the tin and gives the reader threads to pick up on. I just can't shake the feeling of dissatisfaction. It's possible that I may revise my rating in future as I'm not so sure my feelings are the writer's fault - the writer who achieved everything she said she would.

Goldstein gives us a tour of the philosophic landscape at the 20th century's quarter-century. And in a way I appreciated; it enabled me to relate the familiar names in those human terms: who liked whom and why. The Vienna Circle was the "in" group of the day. So, the politics played out there lived into the present at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton. I'm a rank amateur philosopher, so her treatment of Wittgenstein, Hilbert, Russell, Schlick (the one who I hadn't known of before) .. enabled me, in ways reading secondary philosophic reading had not done for me before, to place those individuals theories in perspective. For example, "early" vs "late" Wittgenstein. If you know Wittgenstein, your cocktail conversation forces you to pick "early" or "late" depending on the tilt of the table.returnGoldstein cured me of that. While you'd think she's effectively bashing Wittgenstein, she leads you to realize, in ways not available to either Godel or Wittgenstein, they had more in common that they, or any contemporaries could see. And maybe the temporal element is what kept them from seeing it. Enter Einstein.returnreturn(to be continued)...