[FOM] Did Goedel "read philosophy"?

[Ignacio Nattochdag]

On 3/8/07, John Steel <steel at math.berkeley.edu> wrote:
>
> Perhaps in one important instance, Godel was too much a philosopher for
> his own good.
>
> I'm thinking of the story that he discovered the basics
> of forcing some time around 1940, and got the independence
> of AC from the theory of finite types that way. The story is
> that he never made the result public because he thought
> of AC as clearly true, and the result purely a technical
> one...........

I agree with what you say: but it should also be noted that this sort
of philosophical drive was also immensely productive for Godel: he did
after all prove the consistency of AC and CH: but you are right, may
be he got a bit blinded about CH because of his philosophical
motivation: another example apart from the one you give was his
obsession, during the last period of his life, with the problem of
determining the true power of the continuum: he insisted it was
aleph2; this obsession led him to sketch quickly some rather
unrigorous proofs and send them to Tarski for publication in the PNAS.

I. N.