Logic is Hard

I struggled with the topic of logic last semester so it's pretty safe to say that I wasn't really jumping for joy at the thought of another jaunt into the horrifying world of binary and numbers. Actually, that's unfair, the binary part from last semester with Frege and the way his logic essentially paved the way for computers makes a modicum of sense. Even now though I don't entirely understand the last HCJ topic but it was fun to go back to Bertrand Russell whose History of Western Philosophy got us through our first year. So for the first part of this little blog, I'm going to give some background to Bertrand.

Bertrand Russell was born in 1872 in Victorian England and lived through two World Wars the end of the Victorian Era and all the Edwardian England and right through into the reign of Queen Elizabeth the 2nd. This ridiculously long life span gave him a lot of time to think and thinking was what Russell did best. Whilst you might know Russell best on this course for being mildly superior whilst writing about nearly all the significant philosophers of history, he was actually at the forefront of the Analytic Philosophy of the early 20th century, taking some of the work of Gottlob Frege and his friend Ludwig Wittgenstein. His most famous work was the Principia Mathematica an attempt to ground mathematics in logic, whereas Frege worked with language, Russell believed you could apply the same logic to numbers as they also were a perfect language like music. For a simple round up of the Principia Mathematica or PM to its friends, I direct you to Mr W. Ikipedia. "PM, is an attempt to derive all mathematical truths from a well-defined set of axioms and inference rules in symbolic logic. One of the main inspirations and motivations for PM was Frege's earlier work on logic, which had led to paradoxes discovered by Russell. These were avoided in PM by building an elaborate system of types: a set of elements is of a different type than is each of its elements (a set is not an element; one element is not the set) and one cannot speak of the "set of all sets" and similar constructs, which would lead to paradoxes."

Well I'm glad we've got that sorted. In the lecture I had no understanding of the Russell school of logic and I left the seminar with a basic understanding of it so hopefully my notes will help me here. If I'm honest though you should just look at Flick's blog when she posts her seminar paper as that helped me quite a bit.
Finally, my thoughts on logic can really be summed up in the following joke:

My mate was yapping on about how "logic can prove anything."
I said, "Nothing is better than eternal happiness, right?" He agreed.
I said, "A ham sandwich is better than nothing, right?" Once again, he nodded.
"So therefore, logic dictates that a ham sandwich is better than eternal happiness, right?"

That shut him up.


Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.