WHITEHEAD, Alfred North, & Bertrand Russell.

£100,000 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Principia Mathematica. First editions of all three volumes of Principia Mathematica, one of only 500 possible complete sets (750 copies of the first volume were printed, but the publishers reduced the printings of volumes II and III to 500 copies each).Principia Mathematica is the authors' hugely ambitious attempt to construct "the whole body of mathematical doctrine by logical deduction from the basis of a small number of primitive ideas and a small number of primitive principles of logical inference" (DSB, XII, p. 14). The belief that mathematics can be derived from logic is one of the principal philosophical theories of the foundation of mathematics, and it has also provided some of the most important results in the formal analysis of mathematical concepts. This belief finds its fullest expression in Principia Mathematica. A fourth volume, dealing with the applications to geometry, was planned but never finished, as both men turned their attention away from mathematics and towards philosophy.

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