>
> Frege (along with Peano) gets much of the credit for inventing modern logic,
> which had hitherto largely been trapped in Aristotle's syllogism for
> formalisms (though Peirce, an American pragmatist/pragmaticist developed
> much of the same thing independently). Still, Russell, Whitehead and
> Wittgenstein made considerable contributions to the early development of it.
>
not to forget dedekind. but i write this note to opine that W calling russell a fool can be excused on the basis of familiarity, but russell's achievements in the foundations of math are (if behind him at the time of W's statement) formidable. after all many did call W a fool, in some sense, for misunderstanding the results of gödel (and talking about books, i remember a decent defense of wittgenstein's words on gödel's results in a collection called gödel's theorem in focus - seems to be out of print now).
--ravi