Currently Reading

+ Logical Dilemmas: The Life and Work of Kurt Godel (by John W. Dawson)
+ Against the Day (by Thomas Pynchon)
+ If Einstein Had Been a Surfer (by Peter Kreeft)

Just started Logical Dilemmas. Kurt Godel was the greatest logician of the 20th century. John W. Dawson is one of the scholars responsible for the publication of Godel's Collected Works and is therefore well-qualified to write a biography and commentary on Godel. Godel's Incompleteness Theorems were the subject of my master's project in theology (basically a warning about how not to apply them to philosophical and theological topics).

Against the Day is long, to the tune of over a thousand pages. Mostly, my fiction reading these days is a bit shy of that (by some 700 plus pages). So far, the story is interesting, like most of Pynchon's work, and is filled with a cast of intriguing characters, crazy adventures, and deep wit. I know this will take me a while to finish, but so far, I am glad to be spending time in the company of the Chums of Chance. Hopefully, this will warm me up for the other two large novels I'm committed to reading in the coming year: Anathem (by Neal Stephenson) and The Brothers Karamazov (by, of course, Fyodor Dostoyevsky).

Peter Kreeft has never published a book that I have not (a) thoroughly enjoyed, and (b) been challenged and inspired by. Even his textbook on logic caused me to rethink my long standing prejudice against the "old" logic in favor of the "new" mathematical logic. If Einstein Had Been a Surfer is a conversation among three characters who individually represent science, philosophy, and mysticism (and yet, these are no two-dimensional allegorical personifications. Kreeft's characters are real people, even if they do not really exist). This book is about the search for a "Theory of Everything." The book itself does not present the details of such a Theory (no Nobel Prize in physics for Kreeft for this one!), but by talking around and through and about the issue, the reader is lead to understand better what such a theory would entail. As always from Kreeft, this work is a creative, well-reasoned piece of scholarship that is easy to take as entertainment (I'd say "mistake" but I rather suspect the reader is supposed to be entertained, in much the same way Plato entertained and instructed us with the Socratic dialogues). Recommended if you like thinking about everything.