Alfred North Whitehead

Principia Mathematica Alfred North Whitehead

2019 Reprint of 1910 Edition. Volume One Only. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition software. Originally published in three volumes. There is no doubt that Principia Mathematica [PM] is of great importance in the history of mathematics and philosophy: it sparked interest in symbolic logic and advanced the subject by popularizing it; it showcased the powers and capacities of symbolic logic; and it showed how advances in philosophy of mathematics and symbolic logic could go hand-in-hand with tremendous fruitfulness. Indeed, PM was in part brought about by an interest in Logicism, the view on which all mathematical truths are logical truths. It was in part thanks to the advances made in PM that, despite its defects, numerous advances in meta-logic were made, including Gödel's incompleteness theorems. The scholarly, historical, and philosophical interest in PM is great and ongoing: for example, the Modern Library ranked it 23rd in a list of the top 100 English-language nonfiction books of the twentieth century.