engleski

Causality as a central concept of Gödel’s Philosophy

Gödel proposed in his philosophical notes (Coll. Works, 3), as well as in his conversations with Hao Wang (1996), a philosophical program of founding and axiomatizing philosophy on the ground of the “fundamental philosophical concept” of cause. Our aim is to show that his ontology, as Gödel axiomatized it for the purpose of his ontological proof, can be further elaborated in the style of Gödel–Artemov’s justification logic (cf. Gödel’s Zilsel lecture from 1938 and Artemov–Yavorskaya 2011), with cause terms in place of necessity operator. We present the axioms and rules of Gödelian causal ontological system CGO, and outline its semantics. This system can throw new light on the main theorem of the ontological proof (necessary existence of the most posit ive being) as well as on the theorem about the modal collapse (proved by Sobel 1987), disclosing their (more precise) causal meaning, and showing that Gödel’s ontology, on the basis of its theistic presuppositions, favors a special sort of extensionalism. From the viewpoint of this causal ontology, Gödel’s incompleteness theorems can be conceived as revealing a kind of the ontological “separation of force and fact”, whereas his ontological proof leads to the unification of force and fact by means of the first cause.

cause; Gödel; justification logic; ontological proof; modal collapse

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