ABSTRACT
However, Bolzano recognized that even this idea is too narrow to capture a statement like (iii) within the extension of analytic truth, since (iii)’s truth makes essential use of the meaning of the nonlogical expression “is earlier than”; if we uniformly replace this expression by certain others, such as “is the mother of,” it ceases to be true. Nor does a statement like (iii) appear to be analytic either by Kant’s notion of containment or by his claim that a statement is analytic just in case its denial leads to a contradiction. Yet (iii) appeared to later philosophers to possess certain features, such as necessity and knowability a priori, also supposedly possessed by analytic truths. Moreover, in the early twentieth century, the emergence of more powerful systems of logic, due to Frege, Russell, Hilbert, and others, as well as the emergence of axiomatic systems of arithmetic and related formal sciences, raised the possibility of a further expansion of the scope of analytic truth to include such statements.
