Gödel, 2nd edition again
OK, here for download are the opening 22 chapters (164 pages) of a draft of the 2nd edition of my Gödel book (and there’s also a partial Table of Contents for the book here). This covers up to and including the first, Gödelian, proof of the First Incompleteness Theorem, and therefore corresponds to the opening 17 chapters (152 pages) of the original edition.
The rewriting isn’t working out as I had originally imagined. I’d thought it would be a matter of minor local tinkering with the original text, but then adding some chapters late in the book. But in fact, as I came to going carefully through the early chapters again, I felt they could do with quite a lot of work to make them more reader-friendly (and make the book more appropriate for the introductory series it is published in). So in fact there will now probably be very little space for new material in the second edition, despite an increased page budget as I expand the earlier material: but I hope the early chapters in particular will be notably more accessible.
This partial draft will be the last one I make publicly available here (though I am very open to requests from those who are keen to have the chance to comment on later chapters when they become available). That’s partly for the obvious copyright reasons: the press won’t be too happy if I give away yet more. But also I don’t envisage so many changes in the rest of the book (except locally in particular sections), whereas here there has been a lot of rewriting and rearrangement, and so there are no doubt a lot of new typos and thinkos that I’d really welcome being alerted to at this stage. So please please send me any comments, even if it is just a note of a trivial typo (you might well be the only person to spot it!).
If you want to focus on new material, then check out in particular the new arrangement in Chs 2, 3, 6; the treatment of induction in Ch. 9; revisions of material in Chs 11, 12; the significantly different Chs 15–17; the division of the treatment of the arithmetization of syntax into Chs 18, 19.
Given the publication schedule, I’d like any comments sooner rather than later (though given I’m producing camera ready copy, I can keep on editing until quite late in the process).
