Russell's Philosophical Approach to Logical Analysis

Abstract

<p>In what is supposed to have been a radical break with neo-Hegelian idealism, Bertrand Russell, alongside G.E Moore, advocated the analysis of propositions by their decomposition into constituent concepts and relations. Russell regarded this as a breakthrough for the analysis of the propositions of mathematics. However, it would seem that the decompositional-analytic approach is singularly unhelpful as a technique for the clarification of the concepts of mathematics. The aim of this thesis will be to clarify Russell’s early conception of the analysis of mathematical propositions and concepts in the light of the philosophical doctrines to which his conception of analysis answered, and the demands imposed by existing mathematics on Russell’s logicist program. Chapter 1 is concerned with the conception of analysis which emerged, rather gradually, out of Russell’s break with idealism and with the philosophical commitments thereby entrenched. Chapter 2 is concerned with Russell’s considered treatment of the significance of relations for analysis and the overturning of his “doctrine of internal relations” in his work on Leibniz. Chapter 3 is concerned with Russell’s discovery of Peano and the manner in which it informed the conception of analysis underlying Russell’s articulation of logicism for arithmetic and geometry in PoM. Chapter 4 is concerned with the philosophical and logical differences between Russell’s and Frege’s approaches to logical analysis in the logicist definition of number. Chapter 5 is concerned with connecting Russell’s attempt to secure a theory of denoting, crucial to mathematical definition, to his decompositional conception of the analysis of propositions.</p>