Kurt Grelling

Kurt Grelling was a German logician and philosopher, born in Berlin on 2 March 1886 and a member of the Berlin Circle. At Göttingen he began working with the philosopher Leonard Nelson on Russell paradox, and their 1908 paper introduced new paradoxes, among them the semantic paradox now called the Grelling-Nelson paradox. He took his doctorate in mathematics there in 1910 under David Hilbert, with a dissertation on the development of arithmetic in axiomatic set theory. He translated four works of Bertrand Russell into German, taught mathematics, philosophy and physics in secondary schools when no university post came, and helped Hans Reichenbach plan the Berlin Circle meetings. In 1937 he published an article defending the first incompleteness theorem of Kurt Gödel against the reading that it is itself a paradox. He died in September 1942.