I hope I find the time to consider specific points of your review later. But I’d like to start with these general remarks, for they give me the chance do do a bit of sociology of philosophy (hoping this is not a problem):

“Berto has an odd conception of what makes a chapter … the expository half of this book has been put together in a bit of a rush … and the chapters have not been tried out on enough hyper-critical students and colleagues … which is probably what Berto meant, but isn’t what his sentences actually say. This sort of casual carelessness is too frequent”

This is totally right.

At the age of 35 I had written 6 books and about 30 papers in three different languages (English French and Italian)… There might be 3,000 pages of stuff published by me out there.
One doesn’t need to bother the “paradox of the preface” to guess that there should be lots of inaccuracies and actual mistakes out there.

That was caused by various things… Among them, the fact that I’m a workaholic and nobody ever taught me how to work. In particular, in Italy and France – the places where I’ve been studying and working – lots of philosophers don’t care about international, peer-reviewed journals. They just care about big monographs. Different academic and cultural standards.

Talking specifically of “There’s Something About Goedel”, that was written (in Italian) in less than two *months*, in the summer of 2007, and (as mentioned in the Italian preface, not in the English edition) mainly for one reason: I needed the publisher’s money. For I was jobless and, well, I had nothing better to do to get some money than writing a book.
It would have been very useful to have “hyper-critical students and colleagues” to discuss drafts of the book. However, I had no colleagues and no students to do me such a favour, no workshops to present stuff to, and even if I had, I could not wait months or perhaps years to gather such comments.

It worked – the book had four editions in Italy in less then a year, so the bills were paid. The publisher thought about an English edition, of which I was happy of course. But I had to translate it myself, for hiring someone to do it would have been too expensive. The translation was anonymously refereed by two major publishers (Wiley-Blackwell and another one), and both accepted to publish it. The rights of the book were owned not by me, but by the Italian publisher, and they opted for Wilwy-Blackwell – it was up to them.
Blackwell hired someone to revise my English, since it’s not my native tongue. But the person revised only the prose, of course, not the technical vocabulary. So I’m sure there are several terminological imprecisions in TSAG. Translating a whole book is a hell of a work.

I discovered the existence of the world of international reviews after I had finished my PhD in Italy (this may give a feeling of how narrow certain environments can be). Having understood that there might have been no chance for me to get even a temporary position in Italy, I thought I had better start to publish in these reviews. Since then, I’ve had papers in American Phil Quarterly, Philosophical Studies, Dialectica, the Australasian J Phil, Philosophia Mathematica, the Philosophical Quarterly, and other places. Luckily, now I have a job, thanks to this work. Unfortunately, not a job in my home country – I had to emigrate in the UK. But it’s ok – given where I started from, it’s a miracle that I’m here.