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Preface.- Dedication.- Part I: Gel's "Own Book on Foundations".- Chapter 1. A Gel puzzle.- Chapter 2. The Ergebnisse book project.- Chapter 3. Gel's reading of the logical literature.- Chapter 4. Gel's manuscript for the Ergebnisse book series.- Part II: Own Book (Foundations).- Chapter 5. Introduction.- Chapter 6. Logicism.- Chapter 7. Antinomies.- Chapter 8. Clear version, from the beginning to the antinomies.- Chapter 9. The epistemological standpoint of the logicists.- Chapter 10. Logical calculus.- Chapter 11. Metamathematics.- Chapter 12. General metamathematics (Princeton).- Part III: Gel's Reading Notes.- Chapter 13. Editorial remarks.- Chapter 14. The untitled notebook.- Chapter 15. The Altes Excerptenheft.- References.- Index.
Viennese logician Kurt Gel (1906-1978) became world-famous overnight with his incompleteness theorems of 1931. The first one states the impossibility to represent all of mathematics in one closed system, the second that there is no ultimate guarantee that such systems could not lead to contradictions. Soon after the publication of Gel's sensational article, he was invited to write, together with Arend Heyting, a concise book about the status of foundational research in mathematics. With Gel prolonging the delivery of his part, Heyting lost patience and published his part in 1934. It has been generally believed that Gel had made little headway with his chapters. A search in the Gel papers showed the contrary to be the case: he had meticulously listed well over a hundred works to study and had practically finished two chapters in his Gabelsberger shorthand, and outlined a third.
Jan von Plato is professor of philosophy at the University of Helsinki. His books include Saved From the Cellar (Springer, 2017), Can Mathematics Be Proved Consistent? (Springer, 2020) and Kurt Gel: The Princeton Lectures on Intuitionism (Edited by Maria H舂een-Anttila and Jan von Plato, Springer 2021).
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