Popper’s Correspondence with Paul Bernays

Abstract

Paul Isaak Bernays (1888–1977) was a Swiss logician who worked on the foundations of mathematics and set theory. (More biographical information can be found in Lauener, 1978.) From 1919 until 1933, when his venia legendi was revoked by the Nazi regime, he worked at the Mathematical Institute in Gottingen. He subsequently returned to the ETH in Zurich, where he would stay for the rest of his career. During this time he wrote Grundlagen der Mathematik I, II (Hilbert and Bernays, 1934, 1939) together with David Hilbert. Popper owned a copy of both volumes, which still exist with many of his own marginal notes in the Karl Popper Collection Klagenfurt. Popper also frequently cites the Grundlagen in his articles on logic. The letters reproduced here concern a meeting between Popper and Bernays which took place in April 1947 in Switzerland. At that time, Popper and Bernays pursued a joint publication on logic, a draft of which is reproduced in Chapter 14 of this volume. This joint work was never published, but these letters provide the context that helps explain its genesis. The correspondence furthermore contains a discussion of some of the criticisms raised by the reviewers of Popper’s articles.