Potter College News

Dr. Landon Elkind, Assistant Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Political Science, was awarded a $281,104 Scholarly Editions and Translations grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for his project entitled, “Principia Mathematica: A Critical Edition”.

Dr. Elkind’s three-year grant, which starts in January 2023, is the largest grant that the Potter College of Arts and Letters (PCAL) received during the 2021-2022 academic year.

Principia Mathematica is a three-volume work on logic and the foundations of mathematics by British philosophers Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, published in 1910-1913. The work was profoundly influential on twentieth-century logic, mathematics, and philosophy.

With this grant, Dr. Elkind will create the first ever critical edition of Principia Mathematica. His work will involve both digitization and collation. Due to the length of Principia, as well as the presence of logical symbols, mathematical demonstrations, and the notations and formatting of the work, typesetting for the digital format will be done manually.

Additionally, the three different editions of Principia, along with the six printings of the second edition, the authors’ corrections that were never implemented by the publisher, and the publisher’s unauthorized edits will be combined in his project.

Dr. Elkind’s critical edition of Principia, which is already under contract with Cambridge University Press, will include the first authoritative and newly digitized version of the text, along with an editorial apparatus designed to serve as a useful tool for scholars in decades to come.

The National Endowment for the Humanities is an independent federal agency that supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. The agency has been funding projects since 1965.