Books

Books : reviews

Steven J. Bartlett, Peter Suber.
Self-Reference: reflections on reflexivity.
Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. 1987

Even before the early twentieth century, when the first semantic and set-theoretical paradoxes were felt in logic and mathematics, an ever-widening circle of disciplines was affected by problems of self-reference. Problems of self-reference have become important topics in artificial intelligence, in the foundations of mathematics and logic, in the psychology of reflection, self-consciousness, and self-regulation. Epistemology, logic, computer science, information theory, cognitive science, linguistics, legal theory, sociology and anthropology, and even theology have faced explicit self-referential or reflexive challenges to research or doctrine.

Self-Reference: Reflections on Reflexivity, edited by Steven J. Bartlett and Peter Suber, is the first published collection of essays to give a sense of depth and breadth of current work on this fascinating and important set of issues. The volume contains 13 essays by well-known authors in this field, written on special invitation for this collection. In addition, the book includes the first general bibliography of works on self-reference, comprising more than 1,200 citations.