Alfred north whitehead syntax11/21/2023 ![]() ![]() The first volume was co-written by Whitehead, although the later two were almost all Russell’s work. Russell’s criticism was enough to rock Frege’s confidence in the entire edifice of logicism, and he was gracious enough to admit this openly in a hastily written appendix to Volume II of his “Basic Laws of Arithmetic”.īut Russell’s magnum opus was the monolithic “ Principia Mathematica”, published in three volumes in 1910, 19. The paradox seemed to imply that the very foundations of the whole of mathematics could no longer be trusted, and that, even in mathematics, the truth could never be known absolutely ( Gödel‘s and Turing‘s later work would only make this worse). The paradox is sometimes illustrated by this simplistic example: “ If a barber shaves all and only those men in the village who do not shave themselves, does he shave himself?“ In his 1903 “The Principles of Mathematics”, though, he identified what has come to be known as Russell’s Paradox (a set containing sets that are not members of themselves), which showed that Frege’s naive set theory could in fact lead to contradictions. Russell’s mathematics was greatly influenced by the set theory and logicism Gottlob Frege had developed in the wake of Cantor‘s groundbreaking early work on sets. He was a prominent anti-war activist during both the First and Second World Wars, championed free trade and anti-imperialism, and later became a strident campaiger for nuclear disarmament and socialism, and against Adolf Hitler, Soviet totalitarianism and the USA’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Russell was a committed and high-profile political activist throughout his long life. Today, he is considered one of the founders of analytic philosophy, but he wrote on almost every major area of philosophy, particularly metaphysics, ethics, epistemology, the philosophy of mathematics and the philosophy of language. Whitehead, where he developed into an innovative philosopher, a prolific writer on many subjects, a committed atheist and an inspired mathematician and logician. He studied mathematics and philosophy at Cambridge University under G.E. His adolescence was very lonely and he suffered from bouts of depression, later claiming that it was only his love of mathematics that kept him from suicide. His parents died when Russell was quite young and he was largely brought up by his staunchly Victorian (although quite progressive) grandmother. Russell was born into a wealthy family of the British aristocracy, although his parents were extremely liberal and radical for the times. He emigrated to the United States in the 1920s, and spent the rest of his life there. After the First World War, though, much of which Russell spent in prison due to his pacifist activities, the collaboration petered out, and Whitehead’s academic career remained ever after in the shadow of that of the more flamboyant Russell. He became Russell’s tutor at Trinity College, Cambridge in the 1890s, and then collaborated with his more celebrated ex-student in the first decade of the 20th Century on their monumental work, the “Principia Mathematica”. Whitehead was the elder of the two and came from a more pure mathematics background. Whitehead (1861-1947)īertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead were British mathematicians, logicians and philosophers, who were in the vanguard of the British revolt against Continental idealism in the early 20th Century and, between them, they made important contributions in the fields of mathematical logic and set theory. Yet, just as the first space-based images of our planet forever changed humanity’s understanding of its place in the universe, shifting the alleged center of, or even decentering of the view on, Whitehead’s “philosophy of organism” to the later works, we might discover previously obscured ideas or new vistas of thought relevant not only to our current philosophical landscape, but also to the pressing issues of our fragile and endangered world.BERTRAND RUSSELL & ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD – Principia Mathematica 1+1=2īertrand Russell (1872-1970) and A.N. The aim of this preferencing is meant not to invalidate earlier approaches to Whitehead’s thought nor is the inference that the later works are more authoritative. Yet, is it also possible that the dominance of this perspective has obscured or even distorted further creative developments of Whitehead’s thought? This volume offers a sort of Copernican revolution in Whitehead interpretation, methodologically and conceptually inviting its contributors to observe Whitehead’s work from the perspective of his later works. Process and Reality is taken to be the definitive center of the Whiteheadian universe and the later works, thereby, appear to many only as applications or elaborations of themes already introduced earlier. Alfred North Whitehead’s interpreters usually pay less attention to his later monographs and essays. ![]()
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