@mattsheffield @theogrin @nihongomaamaa It’s a lesson every generation must contend with. 100 years ago, Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead tried to write Principia Mathematica, an attempt to reduce all of mathematics to pure logic.However, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Russell’s former student, would later upend its entire foundation. In his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), Wittgenstein argued that language and logic could only depict the world, not ground it—that the limits of logic were the limits of meaning itself. So basically, all that work put into Principia Mathematica was futile—and this was a three-volume work. We still have folks like Bertrand Russell walking around but none of them have learned his lesson.
M
