Popper’s Correspondence with Alonzo Church

Abstract

AbstractAlonzo Church (1903–1995) was an American logician and mathematician, well-known for his contributions to the theory of computability. He co-founded the Journal of Symbolic Logic and served as editor for reviews for its first forty-four volumes (cf. Enderton, H. B. (1995). In Memoriam: Alonzo Church. In: The Bulletin of Symbolic Logic 1 (4), pp. 486–488.). Popper writes to him in this capacity in order to have his articles reviewed; he had hoped that Church would review his articles himself, but Church had to decline this suggestion and gave the reviews to Kleene and McKinsey instead (cf. this volume, § 13.12, § 13.13 and § 13.14). Apart from helping to fix the dates of the publication and dissemination of Popper’s articles, the correspondence also contains a small addendum to “On the Theory of Deduction I” (Popper, 1948a, Chapter 5 of this volume).