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Friday, March 13, 2020

Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems And Philosophy

One of the philosophical implications of Kurt Gödel’s two incompleteness theorems is that an all-inclusive definition of philosophical truth is not possible. The human brain has built-in limitations of its own, and there are several problems that it is incapable of solving. The obvious truths for which cogent proof is not possible are generally accepted by the philosophers as being prior to philosophy or axiomatic. But there can be a number of true statements which cannot be formally deduced from a given set of axioms and are neither provable nor refutable. It follows that philosophy is not possible without intuitions, creativity, and rationalization, and that the nature of the philosophical truth cannot be fully formalized, since new perspectives on this truth will forever await invention and discovery. Therefore, no limits can be placed on the inventiveness of the philosophers in their development of new methods of finding the truth.

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