Bertrand Russell · Mathematics
Russell’s great program in <em>Principia Mathematica</em>: the claim that mathematics is not a separate science built on its own axioms but a branch of logic, so that every truth of arithmetic can be derived from purely logical principles and definitions.
You learned that logicism is the thesis that mathematics reduces to logic: its concepts can be defined using only logical notions, and its theorems derived from logical axioms. Explain the two halves of that claim, and why Principia Mathematica needed such an enormous scaffolding to build arithmetic.
Leads to Gottlob Frege.
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