Computation, Logic, Philosophy

This book is important to philosophers, logicians, computer scientists, and historians of contemporary philosophy and technology. The essays collected here, chiefly written between 1953 and 1966, reveal the working of one of most productive and prophetic minds in recent philosophy.
This first set of essays are philosophical and they develop "Wittgensteinian" themes, emphasizing mathematician's practice and such concepts as surveyability and feasibility. That a proof is surveyable by us or that a computation is feasible on a certain machine are both vague phenomena and relative to our actual abilities (or the machine's). These notions seem more practical than traditional formal or idealistic concepts like arbitrarily large finite number or Turing machine.
Wang shows how the philosophy of mathematics might be different if examined using these more human-centered concepts. In his well-known, but hard to obtain, "Process and Existence in Mathematics", he questions whether there can be, ultimately, a sharp division between theory and practice in mathematics. "Shall we say that theoretical and practical significances merge in such fundamental improvements in the technology of mathematics (as Arabic notation, logarithmic tables, computing machines)?" "Logic, Computation and Philosophy" adumbrates a philosophy and history of mathematics that is more closely tied to actual mathematical developments than are the traditional foundational approaches.
以上内容转自著名学术论文网站JSTOR，《Mind》杂志数理哲学家Thomas Tymoczko对本书的书评。