A Few Introductory Words for the Gödel Prize 2025 Ceremony

Dear ladies and gentlemen,

My name is René Talbot, and together with Hans Schwarzlow, we are the founders of the Kurt Gödel Circle of Friends.

This fourth competition is the crowning conclusion of the Gödel competitions that we started in 2019, unless the competition is taken over by one of the two universities of Wuppertal or Bamberg. At the same time, however, it also marks the start of preparations for the Gödel Year 2028. The first impulse for that also came from us Gödel enthusiasts—so to speak, from the „Gödel fan section.“

Looking back, we found a key ally in Christoph Benzmüller, who hosted a workshop at Freie University of Berlin on February 27, 2019, where we were able to publicly launch our first competition. He also agreed to serve on the jury for that inaugural contest, alongside Eva-Maria Engelen and Oliver Passon. At the time, we could not have foreseen that, following our initial question seeking proof of the impossibility of defending reductionism, we would, through the next three competitions, push the boundaries of provocative inquiry so far that Gödel’s ontology and metaphysics would now take center stage in such a remarkable way.

Thus, Gödel becomes not only a challenge in mathematics and logic, physics and astronomy, but also in the core domains of philosophy—namely metaphysics and ontology. This is exemplified by the title Cordelia Mühlenbeck chose for her competition entry: Gödel’s Holistic Ontology – the foundation of science on an exact theory of metaphysics. It’s a bold claim to speak of an exact theory as the foundation of science—but, as I said, it’s magnificent.
Thus opportunities are opened up and the second winner of the first prize, Tim Lethen, writes about Gödel and the Materialism of Angels.

For over a hundred years, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s seemingly banal statement in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”, has drawn boundaries around ontology and metaphysics. Especially after 1945, this contributed to science becoming increasingly reductionist. The existentialists broke out of this enclosure. They recognized that existence precedes essence, and therefore there can be no fixed definition of human nature. People become who they are through their choices and development. The existentialists focused on human decisions and freedom. In this way, meaning gains a presence in the world. Or, as Ernst Bloch put it: “I am, but I do not have myself, therefore we are yet to become.”

In the long run, Kurt Gödel has thus outwitted the Vienna Circle and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The 4th Gödel Award competition has revealed that there are good reasons to talk about metaphysics and ontology after all, even on the basis of an exact theory, and that we do not have to remain silent. This fulfills what Wittgenstein stated as the goal of philosophy in his Philosophical Investigations: “To show the fly the way out of the fly bottle.” (PI 309)

And now, over to Oliver Passon for the award ceremony. He is perhaps the foremost expert in German-speaking Europe on Bohm’s interpretation of quantum mechanics, whose non-locality fits perfectly with Gödel’s holistic ontology.