The Incomplete Universe: Totality, Knowledge and Truth (Hardback)

The central claim of this philosophical exploration is that within any logic we have, there can be no coherent notion of all truth or of total knowledge. Grim examines a series of logical paradoxes and related formal results to reveal their implications for contemporary epistemology, metaphysics and the philosophy religion. He reaches the provocative conclusion that, if the universe is thought of in terms of its truth, it is essentially open and incomplete. "The Incomplete Universe" includes work on the liar paradox and attempts at solution, Kaplan and Montague's paradox of the knower, the Goedel theorems and related incompleteness phenomena, and new forms of Cantorian argument. The emphasis throughout is philosophical rather than formal, with an eye to connections with possible worlds, the notion of omniscience, and the opening lines of the "Tractatus": "The world is all that is the case".