can nonexistence exist?

[Pommer]

One of the advantages of living in Great Court, Trinity I seem to recall, was the fact that one could pop across at any time of the day or night and trap the then young G. E. Moore into a logical falsehood by means of a cunning semantic subterfuge. I recall one occasion with particular vividness. I had popped across and had knocked upon his door. "Come in," he said. I decided to wait awhile in order to test the validity of his proposition. "Come in," he said once again. "Very well," I replied, "if that is in fact truly what you wish."

I opened the door accordingly and went in, and there was Moore seated by the fire with a basket upon his knees. "Moore," I said, "do you have any apples in that basket?" "No," he replied, and smiled seraphically, as was his wont. I decided to try a different logical tack. "Moore," I said, "do you then have some apples in that basket?" "No," he replied, leaving me in a logical cleft stick from which I had but one way out. "Moore," I said, "do you then have apples in that basket?" "Yes," he replied. And from that day forth, we remained the very closest of friends.

R

 

[Pommer]

Bertrand Russell maintains that all first premises are flawed so therefore all logic is flawed

love,

tuck

A rather self-defeating position, Mr. Russell has.
I assume that his conclusion includes his logic,
which makes him easily dismissed, by his own standard.

Mr. Russell does not hold to a correspondence view of truth,
which is the root of his error.

Truth is that which corresponds to its predicate.

I have a diamond.
It has a flaw.
It is still a valid diamond.
It is just that it is not perfeckt.

I would guess that Russell's point was that we cannot know for certain that our logic is not flawed but can safely assume that it is indeed flawed and go about slogging on to find a more precise way to express both our premises and (therefore) our conclusions.

Otherwise we'd (one day) simply decide it's "close enough for government work" and stop looking!

[Russell's] conclusion includes his logic,
which makes him easily dismissed, by his own standard.

Were it not for paradoxes this would be true.

 

[quatona]

I don't see any clear distinction between the two. Can logic not make sense? Can good sense be illogical? I doubt that.

Not to me, but it was the premise.
Then again "logic is flawed" is so unprecise a statement that I have a hard time believing that this is what Russell said.

 

[bricklayer]

I am left to believe that the first-principles of logic actually reflect God existential nature,
therefore, anything we can say about that infinite nature, with a finite language, can be analogous, at best.
In that sense, our expressions of the first-principles is infinitely inadequate.

The difference between an infinite and a finite is infinite.