Godel's Natural Deduction

Abstract

This is a companion to a paper by the authors entitled "Godel on deduction", which examined the links between some philosophical views ascribed to Godel and general proof theory. When writing that other paper, the authors were not acquainted with a system of natural deduction that Godel presented with the help of Gentzen's sequents, which amounts to JaA gt kowski's natural deduction system of 1934, and which may be found in Godel's unpublished notes for the elementary logic course he gave in 1939 at the University of Notre Dame. Here one finds a presentation of this system of Godel accompanied by a brief reexamination in the light of the notes of some points concerning his interest in sequents made in the preceding paper. This is preceded by a brief summary of Godel's Notre Dame course, and is followed by comments concerning Godel's natural deduction system.