Prof. Dr. Juliet Floyd: Research Project

Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Reactions to the Hilbert Program and to the Limitative Results of Gödel and Turing in the 1930s and 1940s

Professor Floyd’s research focuses on the history of twentieth-century philosophy, including its relations to eighteenth-century philosophy, especially on topics in epistemology and the philosophy of logic and mathematics. She has an abiding interest in the nature of objectivity and its relation to reciprocity in dialogue. In recent research, she argues that the history of efforts to formalize rationality and meaning should be placed front and center in the context of twentieth-century intellectual history, a history to which she believes philosophers can contribute. Professor Floyd’s writings have examined the interplay between logic, mathematics and philosophy in figures such as Kant, Frege, Wittgenstein, Gödel and Quine. She has also written articles on the objectivity and nature of rulefollowing, on the fate of empiricism in the 1950s, and on the historical significance of attempts at the mathematical rigorization of intuitive notions such as meaning, truth, proof, reference, and algorithm. Her current project, which she will work on while at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg, is a book documenting Wittgenstein’s philosophical reactions to the Hilbert program and to the limitative results of Gödel and Turing in the 1930s and 1940s.