_The Russell Logic_
To justify its pretensions, logic had to change. We have seen new logics arise of which the most interesting is that of Russell. It seems he has nothing new to write about formal logic, as if Aristotle there had touched bottom. But the domain Russell attributes to logic is infinitely more extended than that of the classic logic, and he has put forth on the subject views which are original and at times well warranted.
First, Russell subordinates the logic of classes to that of propositions, while the logic of Aristotle was above all the logic of classes and took as its point of departure the relation of subject to predicate. The classic syllogism, "Socrates is a man," etc., gives place to the hypothetical syllogism: "If _A_ is true, _B_ is true; now if _B_ is true, _C_ is true," etc. And this is, I think, a most happy idea, because the classic syllogism is easy to carry back to the hypothetical syllogism, while the inverse transformation is not without difficulty.
And then this is not all. Russell's logic of propositions is the study of the laws of combination of the conjunctions _if_, _and_, _or_, and the negation _not_.
In adding here two other conjunctions, _and_ and _or_, Russell opens to logic a new field. The symbols _and_, _or_ follow the same laws as the two signs × and +, that is to say the commutative associative and distributive laws. Thus _and_ represents logical multiplication, while _or_ represents logical addition. This also is very interesting.
Russell reaches the conclusion that any false proposition implies all other propositions true or false. M. Couturat says this conclusion will at first seem paradoxical. It is sufficient however to have corrected a bad thesis in mathematics to recognize how right Russell is. The candidate often is at great pains to get the first false equation; but that once obtained, it is only sport then for him to accumulate the most surprising results, some of which even may be true.
