Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

SUBSCRIBE NOW

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit Subscriptions.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Articles

Mummy, Mummy, what’s Russell’s Paradox?

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) was one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th Century. Much of his early work was concerned with the foundations of mathematics and logic. For Russell, one of the basic building blocks of mathematics was set theory. Everything else depended on it. He was therefore disconcerted, to say the least, when in 1901 he discovered the following problem.

…