With material on his early philosophical views, his contributions to set theory and his work on nominalism and higher-order quantification, this book offers a uniquely expansive critical commentary on one of analytical philosophy’s great ...

SummaryIn June 1913 the 18-year-old Norbert Wiener presented to Harvard University a doctoral thesis comparing the logical systems of Schröder and Russell, with special reference to their treatment of relations. Shortly afterwards he visited Russell in Cambridge (England) and showed him a copy of the thesis. Russell wrote out some comments, to which Wiener replied.None of these documents has been published. In this paper I summarise the contents of Wiener's thesis, and describe and quote from the subsequent discussion with Russell. (...) I preface the account with some remarks on the personal relationship of Wiener and Russell, and conclude it with the description of the location of the various documents cited. (shrink)

A theory of definitions which places the eliminability and conservativeness requirements on definitions is usually called the standard theory. We examine a persistent myth which credits this theory to Leśniewski, a Polish logician. After a brief survey of its origins, we show that the myth is highly dubious. First, no place in Leśniewski's published or unpublished work is known where the standard conditions are discussed. Second, Leśniewski's own logical theories allow for creative definitions. Third, Leśniewski's celebrated ‘rules of definition’ lay (...) merely syntactical restrictions on the form of definitions: they do not provide definitions with such meta-theoretical requirements as eliminability or conservativeness. On the positive side, we point out that among the Polish logicians, in the 1920s and 1930s, a study of these meta-theoretical conditions is more readily found in the works of Łukasiewicz and Ajdukiewicz. (shrink)