Metodo

International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy

Series | Book | Chapter

193108

Russell's road to logicism

Jeremy Heis

pp. 301-332

Abstract

This paper explains the intellectual route that Russell followed in moving from the Kantian philosophy of geometry defended in his 1897 An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry [EFG] to his view in Principles of Mathematics [POM] (1903) that all mathematics is formal logic. I argue that Russell was already committed to a kind of "logicism" in EFG. For this reason, Russell's road to logicism was much shorter than Russell himself often suggests, and the number of substantive philosophical changes that Russell made to get from EFG to logicism was surprisingly small. In particular, I show that Russell was committed to logicism even before his encounter with Peano's logic in August 1900.

Publication details

Published in:

Lapointe Sandra, Pincock Christopher (2017) Innovations in the history of analytical philosophy. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.

Pages: 301-332

DOI: 10.1057/978-1-137-40808-2_10

Full citation:

Heis Jeremy (2017) „Russell's road to logicism“, In: S. Lapointe & C. Pincock (eds.), Innovations in the history of analytical philosophy, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 301–332.