[FOM] Goedel on philosophy

[Buckner]

Martin:
>>
As I thought subscribers to this list knew perfectly well, Goedel 
studied Kant in his youth, and in his later years studied Leibniz and 
then Husserl in his usual ultra-intensive manner.
>>

I didn't know he had studied Husserl.  Obviously he had read Russell, as
he wrote a paper on Russell.  But that, as far as I know, was his only
philosophical work.  

What prompted my remark was the oddness of Godel's suggestion about
philosophy.  Was his reading in philosophy wide, or was it confined to
limited areas of philosophy?  The wider one's reading in philosophy,
particularly from different periods, the gloomier you tend to get about
any sort of progress.

In what sense did he mean that philosophy now (i.e. then in the 20C) is
like Bablylonian mathematics?  

He can't have meant that philosophy is a little researched science in
its infancy, since philosophy is probably the most researched and
written about subject in the world.  

Did he mean that there is no systematic approach to philosophy as in
mathematics, where we start with propositions that cannot be coherently
denied, and move step by step with logical precision to deduce the
objects of all possible knowledge.  But many systems of philosophy,
particularly rationalist ones, have tried to take such a systematic
approach.

It's not clear to me what he meant by his statement.