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Kurt Gödel and Phenomenology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Richard Tieszen
Richard Tieszen*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, San Jose State University
*
‡Send reprint requests to the author, Department of Philosophy, San Jose State University, One Washington Square, San Jose, CA 95192–0096, USA.
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Abstract

Gödel began to seriously study Husserl's phenomenology in 1959, and the Gödel Nachlass is known to contain many notes on Husserl. In this paper I describe what is presently known about Gödel's interest in phenomenology. Among other things, it appears that the 1963 supplement to “What is Cantor's Continuum Hypothesis?”, which contains Gödel's famous views on mathematical intuition, may have been influenced by Husserl. I then show how Gödel's views on mathematical intuition and objectivity can be readily interpreted in a phenomenological theory of intuition and mathematical knowledge.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 59 , Issue 2 , June 1992 , pp. 176 - 194
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1992

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Footnotes

†

I would like to thank Hao Wang for comments, and for discussion and correspondence about Gödel's philosophical interests. I have also benefited from correspondence with Solomon Feferman, John Dawson, Jr., and Cheryl Dawson, and from comments by Lila Luce, Penelope Maddy, Pieranna Garavaso, Steven G. Crowell, J. N. Mohanty, Izchak Miller, and a referee for Philosophy of Science. Parts of this paper were presented to the 1989 Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association, to the 1989 Spring meeting of the Association for Symbolic Logic, and to the Philosophy Department Colloquium at the University of Iowa. I thank members of those audiences for comments.

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