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This book offers a comprehensive critical survey of issues of historical interpretation and evaluation in Bertrand Russell's 1918 logical atomism lectures and logical atomism itself. These lectures record the culmination of Russell's thought in response to discussions with Wittgenstein on the nature of judgement and philosophy of logic and with Moore and other philosophical realists about epistemology and ontological atomism, and to Whitehead and Russell's novel extension of revolutionary nineteenth-century work in mathematics and logic. Russell's logical atomism lectures have had a lasting impact on analytic philosophy and on Russell's contemporaries including Carnap, Ramsey, Stebbing, and Wittgenstein. Comprised of 14 original essays, this book will demonstrate how the direct and indirect influence of these lectures thus runs deep and wide.
List of contents
Part I History of Russell's Logical Atomism.- 1. On Russell's Logical Atomism; Landon D. C. Elkind.- 2. Logical Atomism's Necessity; Gregory Landini.- 3. Logical Atomism in Russell's Later Works; Gülberk Koç Maclean.- Part II Influences on Russell's Logical Atomism,- 4. Russell and Frege on the Power of Symbols and the Compositionality of Linguistic Expressions; Pieranna Garavaso.- 5. Russell's and Wittgensten's Logical Atomisms; David G. Stern.- 6. Russell in Transition 1914-1918: From Theory of Knowledge to "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism"; Russell Wahl.- Part III Metaphysics: Fundamentality and Negative Facts.- 7. Russell on Ontological Fundamentality and Existence; Kevin C. Klement.- 8. The Near Riot Over Negative Facts; Bernard Linsky.- 9. Can we be Positive About Russell's Negative Facts?; Katarina Perovic.- Part IV Language: The Theory of Judgment and Descriptivism.- 10. Russell's Discussion of Judgment in the Philosophy of Logical Atomism: Did Russell have a Theory of Judgemen in 1918?; Anssi Korhonen.- 11. Russell's Descriptivism about Proper Name and Indexicals: Reconstruction and Defense; Francesco Orilia.- Part V Epistemology: Acquaintance and Analysis.- 12. The Possibility of Analysis: Convergence and Proofs of Convergence; David Fisher and Charles McCarty.- 13. The Underlying Presuppositions of Logical Atomism; Richard Fumerton.- 14. Russell and Wittgenstein on Occam's Razor; James Levine.
About the author
Gregory Landini is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa, USA. He is the author of four books on the founding figures of analytic philosophy, including the groundbreaking Russell's Hidden Substitutional Theory in 1998 - explaining how the early substitutional logic of Russell’s type-free ontology of propositions, which was planned for his never realized second volume of The Principles of Mathematics (1903) evolved into the “no-propositions” simple type formal grammar of Principia Mathematica (1910). It’s sequel, Wittgenstein’s Apprenticeship with Russell (2007) argues that Wittgenstein’s Tractarian doctrines were offered in alliance with Russell’s 1914 program for scientific method in philosophy with an emulation of Principia’s logic as its essence. Together with his book Russell (2010), all three earned Bertrand Russell Society Book Awards. The fourth book, Frege’s Notations: What they are and how they mean (2012) is in Palgrave Macmillan’s History of Analytic Philosophy Series. Landini has written many scholarly articles on Russell, including “Whitehead’s (Badly) Emended Principia” and “Typos of Principia Mathematica” in History and Philosophy of Logic, “Russellian Facts About the Slingshot” in Axiomathes, and “Zermelo and Russell’s Paradox: Is There a Universal Set?” and “Logicism and the Problem of Infinity: The Number of Numbers” in Philosophia Mathematica. He is a director of the Bertrand Russell Society.
Landon D. C. Elkind is a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Iowa, USA. He is treasurer of the Bertrand Russell Society and of the Society for the Study of the History of Analytical Philosophy. His dissertation, In Defense of Logical Atomism, concerns both the necessary features of the underlying logic of logical atomism and what doctrines are essential to logical atomism, especially in light of its historical development.
Summary
This book offers a comprehensive critical survey of issues of historical interpretation and evaluation in Bertrand Russell's 1918 logical atomism lectures and logical atomism itself. These lectures record the culmination of Russell's thought in response to discussions with Wittgenstein on the nature of judgement and philosophy of logic and with Moore and other philosophical realists about epistemology and ontological atomism, and to Whitehead and Russell’s novel extension of revolutionary nineteenth-century work in mathematics and logic. Russell's logical atomism lectures have had a lasting impact on analytic philosophy and on Russell's contemporaries including Carnap, Ramsey, Stebbing, and Wittgenstein. Comprised of 14 original essays, this book will demonstrate how the direct and indirect influence of these lectures thus runs deep and wide.
