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Philosophia Mathematica Advance Access originally published online on November 17, 2008
Philosophia Mathematica 2009 17(1):116-120; doi:10.1093/philmat/nkn034
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© The Author [2008]. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Book Review

PIERRE CASSOU-NOGUÈS. Les Démons de Gödel: Logique et Folie. [Gödel's Demons: Logic and Craziness]

Yehuda Rav*

* Department of Mathematics, University of Paris-Sud, F-91405 Orsay, France. yehuda.rav@orange.fr

PIERRE CASSOU-NOGUÈS. Les Démons de Gödel: Logique et Folie. [Gödel's Demons: Logic and Craziness]. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2007. ISBN 978-2-02-092339-2. Pp. 277.

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

The author's aim in this biography is to shed light on the contrasts and polarity—yet relationship—between the rational and the irrational in Gödel's work and personality. On the one hand there is the genius logician whose technical work can be said practically to have attained the limits of what rational thought can produce; on the other hand, one is struck, claims the author, by the irrationality in Gödel's personality and psychic structure, such as his belief in the existence of spirits, demons, angels, the devil, and other evil-wishing forces that he thought had haunted and deprived him of a peaceful existence.

As is well known from other biographies, Gödel was of a frail physical health and psychic balance, having suffered from his student days on from bouts of depression and ‘nervous’ breakdowns—generally attributed to being overworked—that required at times short hospitalization in a sanatorium and culminating toward the end of . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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