The philosophy of Mr. B*rtr*nd R*ss*ll

The view that the fundamental principles of logic consist solely of the law of identity was held by Leibniz,[2] Drobisch, Uberweg,[3] and Tweedledee. Tweedledee, it may be remem...

I once inquired of a maid-servant whether her mistress was at home. She replied, in a doubtful fashion, that she _thought_ that her mistress was in unless she was out. I conclud...

Identities are frequently used in common life by people who seem to imagine that they can draw important conclusions respecting conduct or matters of fact from them. I have hear...

I once heard of a meritorious lady who was extremely conventional; on the slender grounds of carefully acquired habits of preferring the word "woman" to the word "lady" and of g...

It may be remembered that Mr. Podsnap remarked, with sadness tempered by satisfaction, that he regretted to say that "Foreign nations do as they do do." Besides aiding the comfo...

Considering the important place assigned by philosophers and logicians to the law of contradiction, the remark will naturally be resented by many of the older schools of philoso...

When people write down any statement such as "The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,"[26] which we will call "C" for shortness, what they mean is not "C" but the _meaning_ o...

De Morgan[31] said that, "if all mankind had spoken one language, we cannot doubt that there would have been a powerful, perhaps universal, school of philosophers who would have...

The universal use of some system of Symbolic Logic would not only enable everybody easily to deal with exceedingly complicated arguments, but would prevent ambiguous arguments....

Frequently ordinary language contains subtle psychological implications which cannot be translated into symbolic logic except at great length. Thus if a man (say Mr. Jones) wish...

Those people who think that it is more godlike to seem to turn water into wine than to seem to turn wine into water surprise me. I cannot imagine an intolerable critic. It seems...

From a problem in Diophantus's _Arithmetic_ about the price of some wine it would seem that the wine was of poor quality, and Paul Tannery has suggested that the prices mentione...

The contrary opinion has been maintained by idealists and a certain election agent with whom I once had to deal and who remarked that something slipped his mind and then went ou...

The pragmatist theory that "truth" is a belief which works well sometimes conflicts with common-sense and not with logic. It is commonly supposed that it is always better to be...

The subject of the present chapter must not be confused with the assertion of ordinary life. Commonly, an unasserted proposition is synonymous with a probably false statement, w...

Often the meaning of a sentence tacitly implies that the commutative law does not hold. We are all familiar with the passage in which Macaulay pointed out that, by using the com...

People who are cynical as to the morality of the English are often unpleasantly surprised to learn that "All trespassers will be prosecuted" does not necessarily imply that "som...

at his bedside, gives rise to difficulties which are readily solved by a symbolism that brings into relief the principle that the denial of a universal and non-existential propo...

A good illustration of the fact that what is called "implication" in logic is such that a false proposition implies any other proposition, true or false, is given by Lewis Carro...

We have seen, at the end of the preceding chapter, that logical implication is often an enemy of dignity. The subject of dignity is not usually considered in treatises on logic,...

Doubt has often been expressed as to whether a syllogism can add to our knowledge in any way. John Stuart Mill and Henri Poincaré, in particular, held the opinion that the concl...

The mortality of Socrates is so often asserted in books on logic that it may be as well briefly to consider what it means. The phrase "Socrates is mortal" may be thus defined: "...

eleven at night, and the last of January in the twenty-first year of his age, at one of the clock in the morning, he makes his will of lands, and dies, it is a good will, for he...

A concept _denotes_ when, if it occurs in a proposition, the proposition is not about the concept, but _about_ a term connected in a certain peculiar way with the concept. Some...

The word "the" implies existence and uniqueness; it is a mistake to talk of "the son of So-and-So" if So-and-So has a fine family of ten sons.[65] People who refer to "the Oxfor...

When people say that such-and-such a thing "is non-existent" they usually mean that there is not any "thing" of the kind spoken of. Venn meant this when he described[67] his enc...

_Is_ has four perfectly distinct meanings in English, besides misuses of the word. Among the misuses, perhaps the most important are those referred to by De Morgan:[72] "... We...

When, with Boole, alternatives (A, B) are considered as mutually exclusive, logical addition may be described as the process of taking A _and_ B or A _or_ B. It is a great and r...

The "Conversion of Relations" does not mean what it might be supposed to mean; it has nothing to do with what Kant called "the wholesome art of persuasion." What concerns us her...

Mathematicians usually try to found mathematics on two principles:[78] one is the principle of confusion between the sign and the thing signified (they call this principle the f...

I was once shown a statement made by an eminent mathematician of Cambridge from which one would conclude that this mathematician thought that finite distances became infinite wh...

Tristram Shandy[82] said that his father was sometimes a gainer by misfortune; for if the pleasure of haranguing about it was as ten, and the misfortune itself only as five, he...

I once heard a man refer to his income as limited, in order to illustrate the hardship of a class of men, of which he of course was one, in having to pay a somewhat high income-...

The theorems of cardinal arithmetic are frequently used in ordinary conversation. What is known as the Schröder-Bernstein theorem was used, long before Bernstein or Schröder, by...

According to Mr. S. N. Gupta,[88] the first thing that every student of Hindu logic has to learn when he is said to begin the study of inference is that "all H is S" is not alwa...

When, in what I believe is misleadingly known as "The Athanasian Creed," people say "The Father incomprehensible," and so on, they are not falling into the same error as Mr. Spe...

Brahmagupta's problem[96] appears to be the earliest instance of a kind of joke which has been much used by mathematicians. For the sake of giving a certain picturesqueness to t...

We have already[98] referred to the contempt shown by some mathematicians for exact thought, which they condemn under the name of "scholasticism." An example of this is given by...

The most noteworthy reformation of recent years in logic is the discovery and development by Mr. Bertrand Russell of the fact that the paradoxes--of Burali-Forti, Russell, König...

Jokes may be divided into various types. Thus a joke or class of jokes can only be the subject of a joke of higher order. Otherwise we would get the same vicious-circle fallacy...

It has often been maintained that the twentieth proposition of the first book of Euclid--that two sides of a triangle are together greater than the third side--is evident even t...

Some people maintain that position in space or time must be relative because, if we try to determine the position of a body A, if bodies B, C, D with respect to which the positi...

[It seemed advisable to give here[122] some views on laughter, most of which were also held by Mr. R*ss*ll, though no written expression of his views has yet been found. In a re...

The "Gedankenexperimente," upon which so much weight has been laid by Mach[125] and Heymans,[126] had already been investigated by the White Queen,[127] who, however, seems to h...