Admission free public lecture: Thursday, July 25, at 17:00

Join us at the 27th Vienna Circle Lecture 2019 which is part of the international Conference “Kurt Gödel’s Legacy. Does the Future lie in the Past?“

Juliet Floyd

In and Out of Mind: Wittgenstein and Gödel, Post and Turing

Models of mind entered and exited the foundations of logic and mathematics in the twentieth century, tossed and shaped by the seas of truth, completeness, incompleteness, and undecidability. Mathematics and its modern methods are still surrounded by important philosophical problems. But the real outlines of the historical debate are not well-known and the subtler philosophical issues at stake are often ignored. Juliet Floyd shall compare and contrast Wittgenstein, Gödel, Post and Turing on what classical limitative results about logic and the foundations of mathematics do and do not show us about “the mind”. She will  also discuss the very idea of “post-human” AI in relation to these themes and the Vienna Circle’s legacy of scientific humanism.

• The lecture will be held in English.
• After the lecture, you are welcome to take part in an informal reception
• The Free Tickets have been booked out (23.7.2019 at 13:30)

On Prof. Juliet Floyd

A philosopher of logic, mathematics and science, Prof. Floyd´s research focuses on the interplay between logic and philosophy from the 18th to the 20th centuries. She is especially known for her work on Wittgenstein’s philosophy of logic and mathematics, but writes widely about such notions as the nature and limitations of philosophical and axiomatic methods, logic and foundations of mathematics, simplicity and modernism in mathematics and the arts, skepticism and rule-following, the concepts of “rigor” and the “everyday” in early twentieth-century philosophy, and the history of American philosophy and pragmatism in relation to European twentieth century analytic philosophy (Vienna Circle, Carnap, Quine, Putnam, Rawls, Cavell). She has furthered the historical study of 20th century analytic philosophy in an international context, holding Visiting Professorships at the Universities of Vienna, Paris (I, Panthéon-Sorbonne), and Bordeaux (Michel de Montaigne). She co-edited Future Pasts: The Analytic Tradition in Twentieth Century Philosophy (with S. Shieh, Oxford University Press, 2001/online 2004), Philosophy of Emerging Media: Understanding, Appreciation, Application (with J.E. Katz, Oxford University Press 2016) and the soon to appear Philosophical Explorations of the Legacy of Alan Turing: Turing 100 (with A. Bokulich, Springer Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science Series). She is currently working on a manuscript treating the impact on Wittgenstein in the mid-1930s of Turing’s and Gödel’s undecidability and incompleteness results.

Professor Floyd joined the faculty at Boston University from the City College of New York and C.U.N.Y. (1990-1994), where she served as Associate Director of the Ph.D. program at the Graduate Center (1993-4). For 2016-18 she has been awarded a Mellon Sawyer Seminar Grant for faculty development (with James E. Katz and Russell Powell) to pursue research into the philosophy of emerging computational technologies and the ways they are transforming social, ethical, and philosophical aspects of everyday life. She is also co-directing The Mentoring Project For Pre-tenure Women Faculty in Philosophy.

Kurt Gödel’s Legacy. Does the Future lie in the Past?

Two events that have had a strong influence on the world of science are celebrating an anniversary this year: the decisive review of Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity is 100 years old. Furthermore, 70 years ago Kurt Gödel proved that theory of relativity is compatible with closed time lines. This Gödel’s rotating universe shows how time travel is at least mathematically imaginable. For this reason, the Kurt Gödel Society is organizing the international conference “Kurt Gödel´s Legacy: Does Future Lie in The Past?” at the University of Vienna from July 25 to 27, 2019.

The conference is supported by the University of Vienna, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the research platform TURIS, the Vienna Center for Logic and Algorithms at the TU Vienna, the Department Vienna Circle and the Vienna Circle Society.