"DELUSIONAL:" Russell and Whitehead explored 1 + 1!

THURSDAY, JUNE 5, 2025

Trump went with 2 + 2: Professor Quine's Word and Object is a highly regarded book. As we showed you during the second summer of Covid, it was once rated as the sixth most important philosophy text of the 20th century.

According to the survey in question, here's the list of the top ten:

The most important philosophy books of the 20th century:
1) Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
2) Martin Heidegger, Being and Time 
3) John Rawls, A Theory of Justice
4) Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
5) Bertrand Russell and A. N. Whitehead, Principia Mathematica
6) W. V. O. Quine, Word and Object
7) Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity
8) Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
9) Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness
10) A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality

Wittgenstein appears two times, as does Alfred North Whitehead. For the record, it was the later Wittgenstein who wrote the top-rated book.

For whatever reason, few people have even the slightest idea about the contents of any of those heralded books. Alfred North Whitehead appears two times, once with the admirable Bertrand Russell.

Small world! According to the leading authority, when Professor Quine pursued and received his doctorate from Harvard, Whitehead served as thesis supervisor.

Professor Quine, a good decent person, died in December 2000 at the age of 92. His obituary in the New York Times started off like this:

W. V. Quine, Philosopher Who Analyzed Language and Reality, Dies at 92

W. V. Quine, a logician and Harvard philosophy professor whose analysis of language and its relation to reality made him one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century, died on Monday at a hospital in Boston, where he lived. He was 92.

As a mathematical logician who wrote and published prolifically, Mr. Quine was often perceived as a philosopher who focused his analytic talents on many apparently disparate doctrines and theses. Yet those who understood him best insisted on his status as a system builder, or a thinker who addressed and attempted to answer the larger questions of philosophy.

Stuart Hampshire, a fellow philosopher, called him in 1971 ''our most distinguished living systematic philosopher.''

Like most philosophers, Mr. Quine set out to define the reality of the world and how humans fit into that reality. He concluded that a person can only understand the world empirically, or through direct experience of it... 

The headline said that Professor Quine had "analyzed reality." Early in the actual profile, we were told that he had tried to "define the reality of the world."

For whatever reason, the ensuing profile of his work didn't get much clearer than that.

In our attempts at communication, lack of clarity is frequently where you can find it. So are the occasional statements which may almost seem to be delusional, if only in the colloquial sense.

As a general rule, observers politely extend great deference to the status of the communicator. So it has often gone with respect to our most highly regarded "philosophers," and so it has commonly gone, again and again, as the nation's mainstream press corps pretends to report the frequently peculiar behaviors of President Trump.

Last weekend, somewhat late at night, the overwrought commander in chief offered a puzzling post on Truth Social. He reposted a claim which seemed to be highly unlikely—a claim according to which President Biden was executed in 2020 and was then replaced by a clone.

Late at night, the sitting president had decided to offer that post. But why had he decided to do something as nutty as that?

Why did he offer that nutty post? In his ballyhooed sessions with the press, no one has bothered to ask!

In yesterday's report, we showed you some of the ways the leading authority on the subject discusses such topics as (clinical) "Delusion" and (clinical) "Delusional disorder."  Tomorrow, we expect to take you back to the concept of the "fixed idea"—in French, the "idée fixe." 

Is it possible that President Trump is in the grip of some such syndrome—with respect to his endlessly inaccurate claims about tariffs, let us say? Also, is it possible that President Trump is in the grip of some other form of "delusional disorder" as that disorder is described by that leading authority?

As always, everything is possible. But of one thing you can be sure:

Under prevailing rules of the game, our floundering nation's leading journalists aren't going to wonder, investigate, inquire, ask or pretend to ask. Under prevailing rules of the game, such things simply aren't done!

With that basic fact in mind, we turn today to something else the sitting president recently said. He offered the claim in a recent mainstage appearance right there in the Oval Office. 

There the president went again! Here's the way the Wall Street Journal began its examination of what the president said:

Why Does Trump Keep Saying Harvard Teaches Remedial Math?

The White House has an expanding list of complaints about Harvard. Among them: a puzzling claim that Harvard kids can’t do math.

“Did you see that, where the students can’t add two and two and they go to Harvard?” President Trump said on May 23 during an Oval Office briefing.

It isn’t just Trump. The rumor that Harvard’s admission standards have slipped so far they are teaching “remedial math” has ricocheted across social media to Washington. Two federal agencies, in official correspondence, have echoed it, one even suggesting Harvard is teaching “middle school math.” 

Something doesn’t compute.

For the AP's fact check of what the president said, you can click here (no paywall). As best we can tell, the New York Times and the Washington Post didn't report on this somewhat peculiar assertion.

For better or worse, the Journal adopted an occasional tongue-in-cheek tone as it reviewed the president's statement. That said, is it true that These Kids at Harvard Today can't add two plus two, ending up with four? 

Also, is Harvard University now teaching "middle school math?" In fuller fairness to President Trump, here's a transcript of what he said that day in the Oval. For videotape, click here:

REPORTER (5/23/25): Why do you not want the best and brightest, from around the world, to come to Harvard—

PRESIDENT TRUMP: I do. But a lot of the people need remedial math.

Did you see that? Where the students can’t add two and two, and they go to Harvard? They want remedial math, and they’re going to teach remedial math at Harvard. 

Now, wait a minute—so why would they get in? How can somebody that can’t add, or has very basic skills, how do they get into Harvard? Why are they there? 

And then you see those same people picketing and screaming at the United States, and screaming that they’re antisemitic or they’re something. We don’t want troublemakers here. But how do people that can’t—when Harvard comes out with a statement that they gonna teach some of their students remedial math, that’s basic math. That’s not the deal.

In fairness to President Trump, he was mainly talking about the foreign students who get admitted to Harvard. A lot of those students can't add two plus two—and once they're admitted, they start screaming that they're antisemitic!

In a minor lapse, the Journal didn't explain that Trump was discussing Harvard's foreign students when he said that a lot of them can't add two plus two. The Journal's lengthy report continued in this manner:

Harvard’s lowest math course is college-level calculus, and their students? Overall, they are something of arithmetic aficionados. Most undergraduates have taken four years of high-school math. The median math SAT score for incoming Harvard students has been 750 or higher over the past decade, in at least the 95th percentile for students nationwide.

“The narrative…it just is so disconnected from what’s happening in the classroom,” said Brendan Kelly, Harvard’s director of introductory math. 

How did this idea multiply? Tracing this requires a few twists and turns.

The Journal went on at great length, explaining how this silly idea got started and how it managed to "multiply." 

Trump has voiced the idea in the Oval twice, the Journal said. Inevitably, Education Secretary Linda McMahon had played a role in the promulgation of the disordered but pleasing idea.

In fairness, this was nothing more than standard issue bluster / blather from the sitting president. In our view, it doesn't rise to the level of the second-hand claim about President Biden's execution, or to the level of claims about the rally crowd which wasn't there and the Haitian immigrants who had been eating Ohio's cats and dogs.

Nor does it rise to the level of the endless bogus claims about the way tariffs work. He's been repeating those claims forever. Is it possible that he actually believes that set of bogus claims? 

While we're at it, is it possible that he actually believes that the 2020 election was stolen? That would pretty much qualify as a delusion. Could he be as disordered as that?

We don't know how to answer those questions, but the president's claim about 2 + 2 brought Alfred North Whitehead to mind. Before he served as supervisor of Professor Quine's doctorate, he had teamed with Bertrand Russell to write the fifth most import philosophy book—Principia Mathematica.

Where the president toyed with 2 + 2, Russell and Whitehead had explored 1 + 1. We've occasionally quoted this passage from Stephen Budiansky's biography of Kurt Gödel:

Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel

[...]

(page 108): ...Russell's idea had been to establish the soundness of mathematics by showing how it could all be reduced to principles of logic so self-evident as to be beyond doubt. Defining even the simplest operations of arithmetic in terms of what Russell called such "primitive" notions, however, was far from an obvious task. Even the notion of what a number is raised immediate problems. The laboriousness of the methodology and notation was all too evident in the (often remarked) fact that that it took more than seven hundred pages to reach the conclusion, "1 + 1 = 2," a result which Russell and Whitehead described as "occasionally useful."

It's true that this matter is "often remarked." As described, this labor by two of our most important philosophers may strike many people as odd, but so it had gone at the turn of the century. So it had gone in what would later be seen as the sixth most important book. 

(Decades later, in his own incoherent way, the later Wittgenstein said goodbye to all that, if only perhaps between the lines in the most important book.)

Our greatest minds explored 1 + 1. That may help explain why you've ever heard of those ten most important books, and why you have no idea concerning what those "philosophers" might have said.

(Full disclosure: We know of nothing to complain about with respect to the eighth-best book.)

Our greatest minds limned 1 + 1.  A century later, our sitting president ranted a bit on the theme of 2 + 2.

Last Saturday night, he also reposted the claim that he'd once debated a clone. To this day, no journalist has been willing to ask him why he did that. No one has even been willing to ask Karoline Leavitt!

Long ago, it seems to us that our "philosophers" walked away from their posts. Today, it can occasionally seem that our major journalists have also gone AWOL That means that several questions remain unasked and unresolved:

For starters, why in the world did the president offer that extremely peculiar post? Also, we return to these more basic questions:

Is something wrong with President Trump? If so, what might it possibly be—and why won't anyone ask?

Tomorrow: Once again, (clinical) "delusion" and us