George Boolos Knihy

George Boolos was one of the most prominent and influential logician-philosophers of recent times. This collection, nearly all chosen by Boolos himself shortly before his death, includes thirty papers on set theory, second-order logic, and plural quantifiers; on Frege, Dedekind, Cantor, and Russell; and on miscellaneous topics in logic and proof theory, including three papers on various aspects of the Gödel theorems. Boolos is universally recognized as the leader in the renewed interest in studies of Frege's work on logic and the philosophy of mathematics. John Burgess has provided introductions to each of the three parts of the volume, and also an afterword on Boolos's technical work in provability logic, which is beyond the scope of this volume.

This book, written by one of the most distinguished of contemporary philosophers of mathematics, is a fully rewritten and updated successor to the author's earlier The Unprovability of Consistency (CUP, 1979). Modal logic is concerned with the notions of necessity and possibility. What George Boolos does is to show how the concepts, techniques and methods of modal logic shed brilliant light on the most important logical discovery of the twentieth century: the incompleteness theorems of Kurt Godel and the 'self referential' sentences constructed in their proof. The book explores the effects of reinterpreting the notions of necessity and possibility to near probability and consistency. It contains the first application of quantified modal logic to formal probability, and shows the results of applying modal logic to formal provability.