The Philosophy of Logical Atomism ― A Centenary Reappraisal

This book offers a comprehensive critical survey of issues of historical interpretation and evaluation in Bertram Russell's 1918 logical atomism lectures and logical atomism itself. These lectures record the culmination of Russell's thought in response to discussions with Wittgenstein on the nature of judgment and philosophy of logic and with Moore and other philosophical realists about epistemology and ontological atomism, and to Whitehead and Russell’s novel extension of revolutionary nineteenth-century work in mathematics and logic. Russell's logical atomism lectures have had a lasting impact on analytic philosophy and on Russell's contemporaries including Carnap, Ramsey, Stebbing, and Wittgenstein. Comprised of 19 original essays, this book will demonstrate how the direct and indirect influence of these lectures thus runs deep and wide.

Gregory Landini is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa, USA. He is the author of four books on the founding figures of analytic philosophy, including the groundbreaking Russell's Hidden Substitutional Theory in 1998 - advocating a nominalist interpretation of Principia Mathematica that Nicholas Griffin, a highly-regarded Russell scholar, calls “ingenious” - and his 2010 Russell; each book earned a Bertrand Russell Society Book Award. Landini has written many scholarly articles on Russell, including “Whitehead’s (Badly) Emended Principia” and “Typos of Principia Mathematica” in History and Philosophy of Logic, “Russellian Facts About the Slingshot” in Axiomathes, “Logic as a Universal Science: Russell’s Early Logicism and Its Philosophical Context” in Philosophical Quarterly, and “Zermelo and Russell’s Paradox: Is There a Universal Set?” and “Logicism and the Problem of Infinity: The Number of Numbers” in Philosophia Mathematica. He is a director of the Bertrand Russell Society. 

Landon D. C. Elkind is a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Iowa, USA. Director and treasurer of the Bertrand Russell Society, a contributing editor to the Bertrand Russell Society biannual Bulletin and the Treasurer of the Society for the Study of the History Analytical Philosophy, , his dissertation on logical atomism concerns both what is the logic underlying logical atomism and, in light of its historical development, what doctrines are essential to it.