Metamathematics and the Philosophical Tradition is the first work to explore in such historical
depth the relationship between fundamental philosophical quandaries regarding self-reference
and meta-mathematical notions of consistency and incompleteness. Using the insights of
twentieth-century logicians from Gödel through Hilbert and their successors this volume
revisits the writings of Aristotle the ancient skeptics Anselm and enlightenment and
seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophers Leibniz Berkeley Hume Pascal Descartes and
Kant to identify ways in which these both encode and evade problems of a priori definition and
self-reference. The final chapters critique and extend more recent insights of late
20th-century logicians and quantum physicists and offer new applications of the completeness
theorem as a means of exploring metatheoretical ascent and the limitations of scientific
certainty. Broadly syncretic in range Metamathematics and the Philosophical Tradition
addresses central and recurring problems within epistemology. The volume's elegant condensed
writing style renders accessible its wealth of citations and allusions from varied traditions
and in several languages. Its arguments will be of special interest to historians and
philosophers of science and mathematics particularly scholars of classical skepticism the
Enlightenment Kant ethics and mathematical logic.
