EMPLOTTING ANALYSIS

Extract

Anita Burdman Feferman and Solomon Feferman, Alfred Tarski: Life and Logic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)

Murray G. Murphey, C. I. Lewis: The Last Great Pragmatist (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005)

The lives of analytic philosophers and logicians do not prima facie appear to be the stuff of popular intellectual biographies. Who but former students or specialists would want to know the details of lives devoted to academic pursuits that, so it would seem, all but exclude personal expression? Demonstrative cultural documents such as Also sprach Zarathustra lay claim to our attention in part because they are the product of minds in dynamic tension with the culture that surrounded them, but Gödel's undecidability proof, for example, owes nothing of its importance to its author's social or psychological life at the time he wrote it. The life of the analyst or logician would, in short, appear to be beside the point—window dressing at best, obfuscating at worst.