Russell's road to logicism

Jeremy Heis

pp. 301-332

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

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.

Cited authors

Kant Immanuel

Russell Bertrand