Although physics tells us that travelling faster than light is impossible, it happens regularly in science fiction. But not even in the wildest flights of fancy can anything move both faster and slower than light at the same time. Starting with Aristotle, philosophers have thought that impossibilities like these make up the nature of logic. This book is about an important, yet relatively unknown, break with this tradition: Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, the
founders of analytic philosophy and seminal figures of modern mathematical logic. They questioned whether there really are such things as possibilities or necessities, and sought the foundations of
logic elsewhere. What makes their position particularly significant is that it rests on a range of views of central philosophical interest: the natures of truth, thought, and knowledge, and the relation between mind and reality. Necessity Lost: Modality and Logic in Early Analytic Philosophy is the first of two volumes; the second will elaborate on the responses of C. I. Lewis and Ludwig Wittgenstein, the immediate successors of Frege and Russell, who also take up the challenge to
modality.
