Abstract

Principia Mathematica, 100 Years after. An Expository Essay. The paper is an expository essay in which I discuss the main goals, concepts, problems, and results of Whitehead’s and Russell’s Principia Mathematica (1910–1913) at its centennial anniversary. The great work by Whitehead and Russell may not be the birth certificate of modern logic, but it is nevertheless the legitimacy and consecration certificate of modern mathematical logic and of the logicist program into contemporary philosophy of mathematics. The emphasis is laid upon the presentation of sentential and predicate logic, identity, singular definite descriptions, set-theoretic and semantic paradoxes, and type theory.