Landon Elkind Wins the CPA Essay Prize for Non-Tenured Faculty

Philosophers have been and still are discussing whether philosophers should seek to analyze concepts in a Socratic fashion, by giving necessary and sufficient conditions for their exemplification, or to engineer them, by considering what ways of thinking certain concepts reinforce and proposing revisionary replacements that destabilize those ways of thinking. Elizabeth Amber Cantalamessa has insightfully called this method for philosophically approaching our concepts "conceptual activism." What this paper does is fill a lacunae in the conceptual engineering literature: philosophers have frequently drawn on early analytic philosophers from the Vienna Circle like Rudolf Carnap and Friedrich Waismann, but not at all on their earlier influencers like Bertrand Russell. This paper shows that some important lessons for conceptual engineers, and even a logical framework for conceptual engineers, can be found where one might least expect -- in the advanced parts of the century-old and symbolism-laden Principia Mathematica.