- Blaise Pascal (plato.standford.edu)
Pascal did not publish any philosophical works during his relatively brief lifetime. His status in French literature today is based primarily on the posthumous publication of a notebook in which he drafted or recorded ideas for a planned defence of Christianity, the Pensées de M. Pascal sur la religion et sur quelques autres sujets (1670). Nonetheless, his philosophical commitments can be gleaned from his contributions to scientific and theological debates in France in the mid-seventeenth century.
- Russell’s paradox (Wikipedia)
In mathematical logic, Russell’s paradox (also known as Russell’s antinomy) is a set-theoretic paradox published by the British philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell in 1901. Russell’s paradox shows that every set theory that contains an unrestricted comprehension principle leads to contradictions. The paradox had already been discovered independently in 1899 by the German mathematician Ernst Zermelo. However, Zermelo did not publish the idea, which remained known only to David Hilbert, Edmund Husserl, and other academics at the University of Göttingen. At the end of the 1890s, Georg Cantor – considered the founder of modern set theory – had already realized that his theory would lead to a contradiction, as he told Hilbert and Richard Dedekind by letter.