Wednesday, September 02, 2009

Philosopher gets comic treatment

Bertrand Russell: The thinking person's superhero - The Independent

Some amusing quotes from this favourable review of a comic book treatment of Bertrand Russell:
His bitterly lonely childhood (he contemplated suicide) was enlivened, he said later, by thoughts of sex and glimpses of a totally logical world available through Euclidian mathematics. But even Euclid's maths rested on shaky assumptions and unproven "axioms", so how could it lead to certain knowledge of the world?

Through GE Moore at Cambridge, he discovered Leibniz and Boole, and became a logician. Through Alfred Whitehead's influence, he travelled to Europe and met Gottlob Frege, who believed in a wholly logical language (and was borderline insane) and Georg Cantor, the inventor of "set theory" (who was locked up in an asylum) and a mass of French and German mathematicians in varying stages of mental disarray. Back home he and Whitehead wrestled with their co-authored Principles of Mathematics for years, endlessly disputing the foundations of their every intellectual certainty, constantly harassed by Russell's brilliant pupil Wittgenstein. ...

Doxiadis and his team make us feel how cataclysmic was the moment when Kurt Godel, the mathematician, in a lecture, announced: "There will always be unanswerable questions," and proved that arithmetic is "of necessity incomplete" – pulling the rug from under the study of logic. ("It's all over," remarked Russell's friend Von Neumann at the conference, meaning the whole of philosophical reasoning.)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

In the spirit of the post about violence in films,and the acceaptance of vilence implying a moral numbness, I have an issue with Russell in that he had a very narcissitic private life, exploited his spouses, and even tried - mayber succeeded - in racing off his son's wife, without regards to his son's feelings.

I suppose to me the question is the extent to which character is unitary, and what society should do concerning bastards who deliver some benefits..

It's a similar question to do with the use of data from experements done in the Nazi death-camps - I recall the conclusion was - do not use.