Kurt Gödel
1906-1978 · Analytic Metaphysics · Renowned
Gödel was an Austrian-American logician whose incompleteness theorems proved that any consistent set of rules big enough to do arithmetic contains truths it can never prove. Mathematics cannot be finished from the inside. He published little philosophy, but his notebooks show a Platonist about mathematics: numbers and sets exist on their own and get discovered rather than invented.
Signature
The position Gödel is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Universals
- strongly leans Realism
- Knowledge
- Pure Reason / Intuition
Positions on the 4 axes the sources answer
- The Divine
- leans Describable (25 on a 0–100 scale from Describable to Indescribable)
- Universals
- strongly leans Realism (0 on a 0–100 scale from Realism to Nominalism)
- Meaning
- strongly leans Inherent (100 on a 0–100 scale from Constructed to Inherent)
- Ground of Being
- strongly leans Transcendence (100 on a 0–100 scale from Immanence to Transcendence)
16 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Gödel refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Theology
- Non-Trinitarian Monotheism
What is your position on the existence and nature of God or gods? - Highest Good
- Knowledge
What is the highest good? - Knowledge
- Pure Reason / Intuition
What is the ultimate foundation of knowledge? - Beginning of Things
- Eternal First Cause
What is the origin of reality? - Time
- Block Universe
What is the fundamental shape of time? - Paradox
- Limit
What is the status of paradox?