Russell and the Royal Road from Geometry
Bertrand Russell moved from the Kantian philosophy of geometry defended in his 1897 An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry [EFG] to a radically anti-Kantian position just six years later in his Principles of Mathematics [POM]. The goal of this paper is to explain the route from Russell's Foundations of Geometry to his view in POM that "all Mathematics is Symbolic Logic." Heis will argue that Russell was already committed to a kind of logicism in his "Kantian" Essay. For this reason, a proper understanding of Russell’s evolution towards POM requires understanding the particular philosophy of logic Russell had been committed to in EFG, as well as the particular mathematics that Russell knew and was studying in the years leading up to 1900. Russell’s encounter with Moore and Whitehead more or less forced Russell into the view that all mathematics is symbolic logic.
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