Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T04:13:39.415Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

EMPLOTTING ANALYSIS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 June 2007

JOEL ISAAC
Affiliation:
Selwyn College, Cambridge

Extract

Anita Burdman Feferman and Solomon Feferman, Alfred Tarski: Life and Logic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)

Murray G. Murphey, C. I. Lewis: The Last Great Pragmatist (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005)

The lives of analytic philosophers and logicians do not prima facie appear to be the stuff of popular intellectual biographies. Who but former students or specialists would want to know the details of lives devoted to academic pursuits that, so it would seem, all but exclude personal expression? Demonstrative cultural documents such as Also sprach Zarathustra lay claim to our attention in part because they are the product of minds in dynamic tension with the culture that surrounded them, but Gödel's undecidability proof, for example, owes nothing of its importance to its author's social or psychological life at the time he wrote it. The life of the analyst or logician would, in short, appear to be beside the point—window dressing at best, obfuscating at worst.

Type
Review Essays
Copyright
© 2007 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)