Recent Work on the Principles of Mathematics [1901]

Abstract

Paper 10 was published in the International Monthly , 4 (July 1901): 83-101. This paper and the more technical article 8 were Russell’s first published work to show the influence of Peano’s symbolic logic. Aimed at a popular audience, Paper 10 was clearly intended to shock. Although it received sharp criticism from several of his colleagues, it remains an excellent introduction, for the non-mathematical reader, to nineteenth-century developments in the foundations of mathematics. Here Russell was particularly concerned with the notions of infinitesimal, continuity, and infinity, with Zeno’s paradoxes, and with the need to make mathematical assumptions completely precise by using symbolic logic.

Topics & Concepts