Russell's Logical Atomism
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Part front matter for Part I Logic and Mathematics
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Published:19 April 2012
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As an undergraduate at Cambridge (1890–4) Russell had studied first mathematics and then philosophy. As he tells us when looking back on his life in the book My Philosophical Development [1959], an important reason for his change from the one subject to the other was his search for certainty (p. 29). Some time earlier he had lost a belief in the certainty of religious truth, and he then felt that if anything could be certain it must be mathematics. However it soon became clear to his keen intellect that the mathematics then taught at Cambridge contained a number of fallacies, and could by no means be called ‘certain truth’. So he hoped that philosophy would be better. At first he had embraced the idealist philosophy that was then prevalent at Cambridge, and had been particularly interested in its application to science and mathematics. (His doctoral dissertation was on the foundations of geometry.) But by 1898 he and his younger contemporary G. E. Moore had come to think that idealism was a great mistake, and had revolted against it. However he retained his previous interest in mathematics, and in fact had already made a draft of what was to become his Principles of Mathematics before the important meeting with Peano in 1900. He was once more hoping that a revised view of mathematics would fulfil the yearning for certainty that had never left him.
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