Augustine’s Solution of Epimenides’ Paradox
St. Augustine, Confessiones I.3:
“An nun opus habes, ut quoquam continearis, qui contines omnia, quoniam quae imples continendo imples?”
“Or is it so that You have no need to be contained by something, You who contains all things, seeing that what You fill, You fill by containing them?”
This strikes me as an early “solution” of Russell’s Paradox. Or rather, as an early manifestation of a typical, ancient-style paradox (very similar to that of Epimenides), which, much later, was turned into something quite (if not completely) meaningless in the interpretation of its occurrence (called a “discovery” by Frege), as Russell’s Paradox, within formal (or symbolic) logic.
Note:
Frege called Russell’s Paradox a “discovery” in his letter to Russel of 22 June, 1902; see fig. 1 below (image taken from: J. van Heijenoort, From Frege to Gödel, A Source Book in Mathematical Logic 1879-1931, Cambridge (Harvard University Press) 1967, p. 127). But can this paradox be properly called a “discovery”? It certainly was a “problem” to both Frege and Russell, but I can’t help but think we are looking at a chimera here. Formal logic is, in and of itself, unable to express this “problem”—the paradox which had already been there for millennia by the time Russell stumbled upon it, and for the “discovery” of which he deserves absolutely no credit—in any sufficient manner. This (what I just wrote in italics), I believe, is what Wittgenstein refers to in Tractatus 3.331 ff.