January 14, 2003
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Remarks on Day 14 of
the Year of Our Lord 2003
On this date —
Alfred Tarski was born in 1902 in Warsaw, and
Kurt Friedrich Gödel died in 1978 in Princeton.
What is Truth?
“What is called ‘losing’ in chess may constitute winning in another game.”
Cited in “A Note on Wittgenstein’s ‘Notorious Paragraph’ about the Gödel Theorem,” by Juliet Floyd (Boston University) and Hilary Putnam (Harvard University), Journal of Philosophy (November 2000), 45 (11): 624-632.
See also
Juliet Floyd’s “Prose versus proof : Wittgenstein on Gödel, Tarski and truth,” Philosophia Mathematica 3, vol. 9 (2001): 901-928,
and
Juliet Floyd’s “The Rule of the Mathematical: Wittgenstein’s Later Discussions.” PhD Dissertation, Harvard University, 1990. Abstract in Dissertation Abstracts International (June 1991), 51 (12A): 4146-A:
“My thesis aims to defend Wittgenstein from the charges of benighted arrogance traditionally levelled against him.”
Romeo: O, she doth teach
the torches to burn bright!
— ”Romeo and Juliet,” Act One, Scene V
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (revised edition, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1978)
