Mr. Rush Limbaugh may be our most influential media personality, but he is not the most clear-thinking. Logic and Mr. Limbaugh not only exposes the fallacies in Mr. Limbaugh's persuasive arguments - it also gives a hilarious introduction to Logic, the science of correct reasoning.

A recent trend in Russell scholarship has been towards the thesis that, contrary to his own recollections, Bertrand Russell really didn’t need the 1905 theory of descriptions to deflate an excessive ontology, because there was no excessive ontology in The Principles of Mathematics, at least not one with golden mountains and the like, and so Russell’s real motive, at least his main one, was not ontological but rather was to replace the incoherent sense–reference distinction on which the old theory of (...) denoting depended. I want to gently dispute that thesis by showing that Russell’s old theory in the Principles was ambivalent on ontic commitment to non-existent things and it could not give an adequate account of the central problem which Russell faced before “On Denoting”, viz. our apparent discourse—including our ability to make true and false propositions—about non-existent things. I also show briefly how the new theory solves the old problem. (shrink)

Early in Principia Mathematica Russell presents an argument that “‘the author of Waverley’ means nothing”, an argument that he calls a “definite proof”. He generalizes it to claim that definite descriptions are incomplete symbols having meaning only in sentential context. This Principia “proof” went largely unnoticed until Russell reaffirmed a near-identical “proof” in his philosophical autobiography nearly 50 years later. The “proof” is important, not only because it grounds our understanding of incomplete symbols in the Principia programme, but also because (...) failure to understand it fully has been a source of much unjustified criticism of Russell to the effect that he was wedded to a naive theory of meaning and prone to carelessness and confusion in his philosophy of logic and language generally. In my paper, I defend Russell’s “proof” against attacks from several sources over the last half century, examine the implications of the “proof” for understanding Russell’s treatment of class symbols in Principia, and see how the Principia notion of incomplete symbol was carried forward into Russell’s conception of philosophical analysis as it developed in his logical atomist period after 1910. (shrink)

A collection of four hundred letters by the great twentieth-century philosopher covers a wide range of topics, including war, peace, sexual ethics, and religion. Simultaneous.