From the available evidence we know that Kurt Gödel began to study Husserl's phenomenology in 1959 (Wang 1978, 1981, 1987, p. 28). This is an event of some significance for students of Gödel's work, for years later Gödel told Hao Wang that the three philosophers he found most congenial to his own way of thinking were Plato, Leibniz, and Husserl (Wang 1987, p. 74). Reports of Gödel's interest in Husserl have also surfaced in other sources. Gian-Carlo Rota has written that Gödel believed Husserl to be the greatest philosopher since Leibniz (Kac, Rota, and Schwartz 1986, p. 177). And Heinz Pagels has written that “during his later years he [Gödel] continued to pursue foundational questions and his vision of philosophy as an exact science. He became engaged in the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, an outlook that maintained that there is a first philosophy that could be grasped by introspective intuition into the transcendental structure of consciousness – the very ground of being” (Pagels 1988, p. 293). As part of his description, Pagels mentions how Gödel thought it meaningful to question the truth of axioms, and to ask about their philosophical foundations, and he then mentions Gödel's view on mathematical intuition. Georg Kreisel has also noted Gödel's interest in Husserl in his article on Gödel in the Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society (Kreisel 1980, pp. 218–219).

In the first part of this chapter I describe some of what is now known about Gödel's interest in Husserl's phenomenology.