Abstract

Kurt Gödel began to study the philosophy of Edmund Husserl in 1959. In this paper I present an overview of central themes in Gödel’s study of Husserl’s phenomenology. Since many of Gödel’s ideas concerning Husserl were never put into a systematic form by Gödel himself, I quote fairly extensively in the paper from several sources in order to inform the reader of the nature of Gödel’s interest in Husserl. Gödel prepared one manuscript specifically on Husserl, as we will see below, and many of Gödel’s comments on Husserl are included in the books of Hao Wang. I will also quote some relevant texts from the Gödel Nachlass. In accordance with these various sources, I provide a brief overview in a later section of the paper of Gödel’s interest in eidetic transcendental phenomenology as a new type of monadology. The relationship of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems to Husserl’s notion of ‘definite’ axiom systems is also discussed briefly.