“The true function of logic … as applied to matters of experience … is analytic rather than constructive; taken a priori, it shows the possibility of hitherto unsuspected alternatives more often than the impossibility of alternatives which seemed prima facie possible. Thus, while it liberates imagination as to what the world may be, it refuses to legislate as to what the world is.”

Source: 1910s, Our Knowledge of the External World (1914), p. 8

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Bertrand Russell 562
logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and politi… 1872–1970

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