Whose your favorite philosopher with respect to the advent and development of computer science? I'm thinking of folks who put logic in the domain of mathematics instead of metaphysics ala Wittgenstein and Russell.

Or whatever. Who is you favorite?

Well I my favorite philosophical computer scientist is actually a cognitive scientist. I enjoy thinking about the thoughts of one Douglas Hofstadter.

Sort of funny story on that (well funny to me). My mother had a copy of "Godel, Escher, Bach" and I really enjoyed looking at all of the pictures in it when I was a kid. But I never READ it. I read some of the dialogs but not the associated text and basically had no idea what the book was about.

Years later I was talking off the top of my head about AI and mathematics etc. and my friend asked if I had read GEB. Well I had no idea what that was and so he began to tell me all about the fantastic multi-leveled book. And so, when he handed me a copy I was very familier with the book... it has neat pictures.

Personally I think I went the right direction. When you are a kid look at the pictures and let them sink in. Then when you are older read the text (well I imagine that 16-18 would be a good age to read the book).

Personal Favorite in the CS filed is John Searle

my problem with John Searle is that I just plane think he is wrong!

No I have enjoyed thinking about his ideas, I don't agree with many of them since I think that they are human-centric (which is understandable coming from a human). I think many of his views are narrow minded in that his arguments are generalizations on a small scale but I just don't think that these generalizations hold on a large scale.

In CS, I'm about to read the Turing biography - he did some pretty major thinking and work in the field of computation. Another good guy is Donald Knuth.

Thanks for all of your replies.

When I posted originally I was thinking of philosophers that were organizing their thoughts before the existence of computers without realizing that the advent of the computer was a topic of debate itself. Was an abacus a computer? How about the slide rule? Maybe Conrad (Konrad?) Zuse' Z1 or Z3 The Turing Machine, Binac, ENIAC, UNIVAC? I've gone from 2500 BC to the Eisenhower administration.

What I actually was thinking about were the Western philosophers who laid down principles of logic (or at least moved logic from the province of philosophy to math). Who did that? Anyway, that allowed for development of the logic gate and the ability of a conductor carrying current to reliably answer yes or no to an appropriately phrased problem (mimicking a formula): the first I/O devices.

Then again, 3000 years back Eastern philosophers were throwing the I Ching, the first widespread form of probability divination in Base 2, exactly as accurate as modern shareware that predicts lottery numbers. I'm only sort of kidding. If you are interested in a dynamite translation of the 64 (2power6) hexagrams' ancient text, check out "I Ching" by Kerson and Rosemary Huang.

So, which philosopher among so many mortals made digital computation possible? Let me ask it backwards (stolen unscrupulously from my one great college prof, Bill Duvall):

You might be interested in this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing_thesis

Trogdor, thanks for the link. That helps, not only with the philosophical questions of Church' thesis, but with lambda calculus in specific and set theory in general.

I Just finished Bertrand Russell's 1908 paper, "Mathematical Logic as Based on the Theory of Types", where he chews on his own paradox (Russell's Paradox) and sets the stage for naive set theory while backtracking a bit into Cantor's set theory. I wish I could link you to the original paper as it's really good and relates to the link you sent me, but I couldn't find it anywhere and ended up paying $10 for a reprint. I'm also going through "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" by Wittgenstein for the first time in fifteen plus years.

Again, thanks!