Does Reason Have Limits? Review Essay on Stephen Budiansky, Journey to the Edge of Reason
Abstract
Stephen Budiansky has produced the second major biography of Kurt Gödel, after John Dawson's classic study. A comparison is made here between the two books, the latter, a more scholarly exercise — emphasizing Gödel's work — the former intended for a wider audience — emphasizing Gödel's life, in particular his private life. Budiansky, after so much has now been written about Gödel and the intellectual climate of the twentieth century, had an opportunity to reflect on just who Gödel was, on what he represented as one of the towering intellectual figures of not just the twentieth but of any century. Unfortunately, it will be argued, this is an opportunity lost. An attempt will be made, however, to do, in this regard, what Budiansky failed to do — to explain why Gödel to this day remains strangely misunderstood and not fully appreciated for who he really was. His time, it seems, has still not come.
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