Miloš Adžić and Kosta Došen, eds, Gödel's Basic Logic Course at Notre Dame, Belgrade: Logical Society Belgrade, Dosije, 2017, 302 pp., ISBN 978-8660472399.

Abstract

This book is at treat. The logic community should thank Miloš Adžić and the late Kosta Došen for their huge effort in editing Gödel’s lecture notes of his 1939 Basic Logic Course at Notre Dame. Adžić and Došen have turned a number of handwritten notebooks that served as the basis of Gödel’s course into—even by modern standards—an elegant logic textbook, which is a pleasure to read. The edited lecture notes highlight once again what a clear and lucid thinker Gödel was. The book consists of an editorial introduction in which the editorial decisions and the notational conventions are explained, the edited text of Gödel’s logic course, and the source text in printed form. The source text provides a good idea of the amount of work that has gone into the editing process. Gödel’s notes are full of abbreviations, a number of passages are crossed out and every now and then there are interludes in which Gödel is concerned with seemingly unrelated issues—for example religious questions. The material covered by Gödel consists of a thorough discussion of propositional logic, an introduction to first-order logic and to basic notions of the calculus of classes. The lecture notes end with a short discussion of Russell’s paradox and the theory of types. In this review I shall start by briefly commenting on the editorial introduction and a number of Adžić and Došen’s editorial decisions. I then provide a brief summary and discussion of the content of Gödel’s Basic Logic Course. Before I start I would like to point the interested reader to the work of Adžić and Došen (2016) and Cassou-Nogues (2009). These works provide an outline of the content of the Gödel’s Notre Dame lectures and comment on their philosophical and historical significance.