Author | Bertrand Russell |
---|---|
Translator | Louis Couturat |
Language | English |
Series | I. (all published.) |
Subjects | Foundations of mathematics, Symbolic logic |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Publication date | 1903, 1938, 1951, 1996, and 2009 |
Publication place | United Kingdom |
Media type | |
Pages | 534 (first edition) |
ISBN | 978-1-313-30597-6 Paperback edition |
OCLC | 1192386 |
Website | http://fair-use.org/bertrand-russell/the-principles-of-mathematics/ |
The Principles of Mathematics (PoM) is a 1903 book by Bertrand Russell, in which the author presented his famous paradox and argued his thesis that mathematics and logic are identical. [1]
The book presents a view of the foundations of mathematics and Meinongianism and has become a classic reference. It reported on developments by Giuseppe Peano, Mario Pieri, Richard Dedekind, Georg Cantor, and others.
In 1905 Louis Couturat published a partial French translation [2] that expanded the book's readership. In 1937 Russell prepared a new introduction saying, "Such interest as the book now possesses is historical, and consists in the fact that it represents a certain stage in the development of its subject." Further editions were published in 1938, 1951, 1996, and 2009.
The Principles of Mathematics consists of 59 chapters divided into seven parts: indefinables in mathematics, number, quantity, order, infinity and continuity, space, matter and motion.
In chapter one, "Definition of Pure Mathematics", Russell asserts that:
The fact that all Mathematics is Symbolic Logic is one of the greatest discoveries of our age; and when this fact has been established, the remainder of the principles of mathematics consists in the analysis of Symbolic Logic itself. [3]
Russell deconstructs pure mathematics with relations, by positing them, their converses and complements as primitive notions. Combining the calculus of relations of DeMorgan, Pierce and Schroder, with the symbolic logic of Peano, he analyses orders using serial relations, and writes that the theorems of measurement have been generalized to order theory. He notes that Peano distinguished a term from the set containing it: the set membership relation versus subset. Epsilon (ε) is used to show set membership, but Russell indicates trouble when Russell's paradox is mentioned 15 times and chapter 10 "The Contradiction" explains it. Russell had written previously on foundations of geometry, denoting, and relativism of space and time, so those topics are recounted. Elliptic geometry according to Clifford, and the Cayley-Klein metric are mentioned to illustrate non-Euclidean geometry. There is an anticipation of relativity physics in the final part as the last three chapters consider Newton's laws of motion, absolute and relative motion, and Hertz's dynamics. However, Russell rejects what he calls "the relational theory", and says on page 489:
For us, since absolute space and time have been admitted, there is no need to avoid absolute motion, and indeed no possibility of doing so.
In his review, G. H. Hardy says "Mr. Russell is a firm believer in absolute position in space and time, a view as much out of fashion nowadays that Chapter [58: Absolute and Relative Motion] will be read with peculiar interest." [4]
Reviews were prepared by G. E. Moore and Charles Sanders Peirce, but Moore's was never published [5] and that of Peirce was brief and somewhat dismissive. He indicated that he thought it unoriginal, saying that the book "can hardly be called literature" and "Whoever wishes a convenient introduction to the remarkable researches into the logic of mathematics that have been made during the last sixty years [...] will do well to take up this book." [6]
G. H. Hardy wrote a favorable review [4] expecting the book to appeal more to philosophers than mathematicians. But he says :
In 1904 another review appeared in Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society (11(2):74–93) written by Edwin Bidwell Wilson. He says "The delicacy of the question is such that even the greatest mathematicians and philosophers of to-day have made what seem to be substantial slips of judgement and have shown on occasions an astounding ignorance of the essence of the problem which they were discussing. ... all too frequently it has been the result of a wholly unpardonable disregard of the work already accomplished by others." Wilson recounts the developments of Peano that Russell reports, and takes the occasion to correct Henri Poincaré who had ascribed them to David Hilbert. In praise of Russell, Wilson says "Surely the present work is a monument to patience, perseverance, and thoroughness." (page 88)
In 1938 the book was re-issued with a new preface by Russell. This preface was interpreted as a retreat from the realism of the first edition and a turn toward nominalist philosophy of symbolic logic. James Feibleman, an admirer of the book, thought Russell's new preface went too far into nominalism so he wrote a rebuttal to this introduction. [7] Feibleman says, "It is the first comprehensive treatise on symbolic logic to be written in English; and it gives to that system of logic a realistic interpretation."
In 1959 Russell wrote My Philosophical Development , in which he recalled the impetus to write the Principles:
Recalling the book after his later work, he provides this evaluation:
Such self-deprecation from the author after half a century of philosophical growth is understandable. On the other hand, Jules Vuillemin wrote in 1968:
When W. V. O. Quine penned his autobiography, he wrote: [11]
The Principles was an early expression of analytic philosophy and thus has come under close examination. [12] Peter Hylton wrote, "The book has an air of excitement and novelty to it ... The salient characteristic of Principles is ... the way in which the technical work is integrated into metaphysical argument." [12] : 168
Ivor Grattan-Guinness made an in-depth study of Principles. First he published Dear Russell – Dear Jourdain (1977), [13] which included correspondence with Philip Jourdain who promulgated some of the book's ideas. Then in 2000 Grattan-Guinness published The Search for Mathematical Roots 1870 – 1940, which considered the author's circumstances, the book's composition and its shortcomings. [14]
In 2006, Philip Ehrlich challenged the validity of Russell's analysis of infinitesimals in the Leibniz tradition. [15] A recent study documents the non-sequiturs in Russell's critique of the infinitesimals of Gottfried Leibniz and Hermann Cohen. [16]
The fundamental thesis of the following pages, that mathematics and logic are identical, is one which I have never since seen any reason to modify.The quotation is from the first page of Russell's introduction to the second (1938) edition.
Charles Sanders Peirce was an American scientist, mathematician, logician, and philosopher who is sometimes known as "the father of pragmatism". According to philosopher Paul Weiss, Peirce was "the most original and versatile of America's philosophers and America's greatest logician". Bertrand Russell wrote "he was one of the most original minds of the later nineteenth century and certainly the greatest American thinker ever".
Giuseppe Peano was an Italian mathematician and glottologist. The author of over 200 books and papers, he was a founder of mathematical logic and set theory, to which he contributed much notation. The standard axiomatization of the natural numbers is named the Peano axioms in his honor. As part of this effort, he made key contributions to the modern rigorous and systematic treatment of the method of mathematical induction. He spent most of his career teaching mathematics at the University of Turin. He also created an international auxiliary language, Latino sine flexione, which is a simplified version of Classical Latin. Most of his books and papers are in Latino sine flexione, while others are in Italian.
Classical logic or Frege–Russell logic is the intensively studied and most widely used class of deductive logic. Classical logic has had much influence on analytic philosophy.
The history of logic deals with the study of the development of the science of valid inference (logic). Formal logics developed in ancient times in India, China, and Greece. Greek methods, particularly Aristotelian logic as found in the Organon, found wide application and acceptance in Western science and mathematics for millennia. The Stoics, especially Chrysippus, began the development of predicate logic.
Foundations of mathematics are the logical and mathematical framework that allows the development of mathematics without generating self-contradictory theories, and, in particular, to have reliable concepts of theorems, proofs, algorithms, etc. This may also include the philosophical study of the relation of this framework with reality.
In the philosophy of mathematics, logicism is a programme comprising one or more of the theses that – for some coherent meaning of 'logic' – mathematics is an extension of logic, some or all of mathematics is reducible to logic, or some or all of mathematics may be modelled in logic. Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead championed this programme, initiated by Gottlob Frege and subsequently developed by Richard Dedekind and Giuseppe Peano.
Clarence Irving Lewis was an American academic philosopher. He is considered the progenitor of modern modal logic and the founder of conceptual pragmatism. First a noted logician, he later branched into epistemology, and during the last 20 years of his life, he wrote much on ethics. The New York Times memorialized him as "a leading authority on symbolic logic and on the philosophic concepts of knowledge and value." He was the first to coin the term "Qualia" as it is used today in philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive sciences.
Friedrich Wilhelm Karl Ernst Schröder was a German mathematician mainly known for his work on algebraic logic. He is a major figure in the history of mathematical logic, by virtue of summarizing and extending the work of George Boole, Augustus De Morgan, Hugh MacColl, and especially Charles Peirce. He is best known for his monumental Vorlesungen über die Algebra der Logik, in three volumes, which prepared the way for the emergence of mathematical logic as a separate discipline in the twentieth century by systematizing the various systems of formal logic of the day.
Logical atomism is a philosophical view that originated in the early 20th century with the development of analytic philosophy. It holds that the world consists of ultimate logical "facts" that cannot be broken down any further, each of which can be understood independently of other facts.
Louis Couturat was a French logician, mathematician, philosopher, and linguist. Couturat was a pioneer of the constructed language Ido.
Ivor Owen Grattan-Guinness was a historian of mathematics and logic.
Giovanni Vailati was an Italian proto-analytic philosopher, historian of science, and mathematician.
Hugh MacColl was a Scottish mathematician, logician and novelist.
Cassius Jackson Keyser was an American mathematician of pronounced philosophical inclinations.
Philip Edward Bertrand Jourdain was a British mathematician, logician and follower of Bertrand Russell.
In mathematical logic, algebraic logic is the reasoning obtained by manipulating equations with free variables.
The aspects of Bertrand Russell's views on philosophy cover the changing viewpoints of philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), from his early writings in 1896 until his death in February 1970.
The mathematical concept of a function dates from the 17th century in connection with the development of calculus; for example, the slope of a graph at a point was regarded as a function of the x-coordinate of the point. Functions were not explicitly considered in antiquity, but some precursors of the concept can perhaps be seen in the work of medieval philosophers and mathematicians such as Oresme.
Mathematicism is 'the effort to employ the formal structure and rigorous method of mathematics as a model for the conduct of philosophy', or the epistemological view that reality is fundamentally mathematical. The term has been applied to a number of philosophers, including Pythagoras and René Descartes although the term was not used by themselves.
James Kern Feibleman was a philosopher at Tulane University, Louisiana. From 1952 he edited Tulane Studies in Philosophy. He styled his system as axiological realism.