Friday, August 16, 2019

Well, maybe …

… Charles Sanders Peirce was America's greatest thinker | Aeon Essays. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I really can’t much about this piece because, while it is full of sound and fury it often isn’r very clear. Take this, for example:

Because of his view of mathematics as the foundation of other disciplines, Peirce considered the Principia Mathematica (1910-13) by Bertrand Russell and A N Whitehead – who used Peirce’s logical notation, rather than Frege’s – to be seriously misguided, because the latter attempted to derive mathematics from logic when it should have been, according to Peirce, the other way around. The failure of the Russell-Whitehead programme would not have surprised Pierce.
 I do not know who the who is in the phrase “who used Peirce’s logical notation, rather than Frege’s” refers to — Whitehead or Russell and Whitehead. The link leads me think it is Whitehead, because the criticism in the link is directed at Russell. And I don’t know who the word latter refers to — Frege, I guess. But then where does Whitehead, co-author of the Principia Mathematica, fit in? Perhaps I am becoming unusually dense in my old age.

1 comment:

  1. Never having read Principia Mathematica, and being more than a bit rusty on Frege, I believe that "who" refers to both Russell and Whitehead, and "the latter" to Frege. My impression is that Frege aimed at establishing mathematics on the basis of a set of axioms from which all else could be systematically derived.

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