The Adventure of Reason, by Paolo Mancosu.

Abstract

The first half of the twentieth century witnessed the birth and flourishing of a radically novel subdiscipline: mathematical logic. While mathematics and logic had been on friendly terms at least since the seventeenth century (see M. Mugnai, ‘Logic and Mathematics in the Seventeenth Century’, History and Philosophy of Logic, 31 (2011), pp. 297–314), and while there were nineteenth century precursors to the idea of applying mathematics to logic (e.g. Boole) and logic to mathematics (e.g. Frege), it is only in the first half of the twentieth century that mathematical logic became a fully mature subdiscipline/research programme. The Adventure of Reason offers a compelling narrative of this exciting chapter of the history of logic and mathematics. Paolo Mancosu is one of the world’s leading experts on these developments, and while many others have made important contributions to the topic, it is fair to say that Mancosu has gone a step beyond with his painstaking work on sources other than the canonical, printed versions of articles and books. He has done extensive research at a number of archives both in Europe and North America, examining documents such as letters, minutes of meetings, informal reports, and transcriptions of lectures — in short, unpublished material of various sorts. This approach has enabled him to produce new insights and at times to provide novel answers to questions of interpretation concerning some of the towering figures in this tradition (such as the controversy on whether Tarski did or did not accept domain variation in his definition of logical consequence, examined in Ch. 16).