Yourgrau P. A world without time.. the forgotten legacy of Goedel and Einstein (Basic Books, 2005)(ISBN 0465092934)(176s)_PPop_

of Godel's advisor, Hahn, also became a good friend of Godel's, inviting him to participate
inó and eventually edit the proceedings ofóthe mathematical colloquium
he founded. The most organized and regular philosophical interactions, however, between
Godel and other minds were doubtless the weekly discussions conducted in Schlick's Vienna
Circle, of which he became a regular member in 1926, having been introduced into the
circle by Hahn.
Godel's Vienna was a city of coffeehouses, each devoted to a particular intellectual
themeóthose with white table tops, convenient for writing formulas, being especially
favored by mathematiciansóas well as of intellectual circles, especially philosophical ones.
The theme of the Vienna Circle was logical positivism. Though a guest in the house of
Schlick, Godel was hardly enamored of the circle's credo of positivism, nor of the hero of
this cult, Ludwig Wittgenstein. The bible of the Vienna Circle was Wittgenstein's Tractatus
(Tractatus Logico-Pbilosophicus was the full title, suggested by Wittgenstein's friend and
former teacher, G. E. Moore, emulating Spinoza's Tractatus Tbeo-logico-Politicus),
completed while the author was a prisoner of war. But Wittgenstein's true war, like that of
the Vienna Circle, was not against the Allies but against metaphysics. Positivism, a
particularly severe brand of intellectual minimalismóa spirit that thrived in Godel's
Viennaóis an antiphilosophical philosophy dedicated to the belief that most of what has
passed for deep metaphysical thinking over the centuries is nothing more than confusion
based on an inadequate understanding of language, which, through artifice, leads the mind
by the nose in all the wrong directions.
Godel did not share the positivist credo that philosophy begins and ends with an analysis of
language and its limitations, nor Wittgenstein-ian's doctrine that the subject matter of
traditional philosophy, as opposed to that of physical science, is precisely that which
cannot be expressed in language. He had no sympathy for the famous line with which the
Tractatus concludes, that "what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence," as
shown in a reminiscence by Menger after the two had attended a session of the Vienna
Circle: "Today we . . . out-Wittgensteined these Wittgensteinians; we kept silent."
Apparently, Godel and Wittgenstein never met, though Godel said that he
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saw him once, when both attended a lecture in Vienna by the Dutch anti-Platonist,
"intuitionist" mathematician, L.E. J. Brouwer.
In the meetings of the Vienna Circle, Godel rarely spoke, signaling his agreement or
disagreement only by a slight inclination of the head. Participation in these meetings was
by invitation only, and membership hovered between ten and twenty. The regular
participants included Schlick and Carnap, the philosophers Carl Hempel, Otto Neu-rath,
Friedrich Waismann and Feigl, and finally, Menger, Hahn and Godel. Conspicuous by their
absence were the philosophers Popper and Wittgenstein, the former because he had not
been invited due to his views about the latter, the latter because he had declined the
invitation. The meetings took place in a dingy room filled with rows of chairs and long