Future tasks for Gödel scholars

Summary

Abstract. As initially envisioned, Gödel's Collected Works were to include transcriptions of material from his mathematical workbooks. In the end that material, as well as some other manuscript items from Gödel's Nachlass, had to be left out. This note describes some of the unpublished items in the Nachlass that are likely to attract the notice of scholars and surveys the extent of shorthand transcription efforts undertaken hitherto. Some examples of sources outside Gödel's Nachlass that may be of interest to Gödel scholars are also indicated.

At the time the Gödel Editorial Project began in the summer of 1982 the cataloguing of Gödel's Nachlass had only just begun. Nevertheless, despite limited knowledge of the extent of that collection, enthusiasm and expectations were high: Volume I of Gödel's Collected Works, which appeared four years later, confidently declared that “Succeeding volumes are to contain Gödel's … lecture notes, as well as extracts from his scientific notebooks.”

In the end, volume III of those Works, devoted to previously unpublished essays and lectures, contained the texts of a number of individual lectures that Gödel gave on various occasions, as well as those of several manuscripts that he left in relatively finished form, including some items transcribed from his Gabelsberger shorthand. But none of the five volumes ultimately published contain any of the notes that Gödel prepared for his lecture courses at the University of Vienna or at Notre Dame, nor any extracts from the three series of notebooks he compiled on mathematics and philosophy.