Principia Mathematica: A Critical Edition

FAIN: RQ-286963-22

Western Kentucky University (Bowling Green, KY 42101-1000)
Landon D.C. Elkind (Project Director: December 2021 to present)

Preparation for publication of a critical edition in print and digital formats of Principia Mathematica (1910-1913) by British philosophers Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) and Bertrand Russell (1872-1970). (36 months)

This three-year collaboration between Western Kentucky University and the University of Iowa will produce the first-ever critical edition of Whitehead and Russell’s landmark Principia Mathematica. The resulting scholarly edition will be published in print and digital formats with Cambridge University Press in 2025. The new edition of Principia will (1) enable us to place ourselves in the mathematical context within which Principia was written by indicating the texts and authors whose theorems and proofs Whitehead and Russell logically analyzed in writing Principia, and (2) reveal the logical structure of Principia’s text for the first time, producing from a database of Principia’s starred numbers tables indicating which theorem is used where, and what is used to prove any given theorem, in simple and easily surveyed tables. This first-ever critical edition will be an important stage in the ongoing modernization and rehabilitation of Principia’s Logicist foundation for mathematics.