ABSTRACT
Russell’s repute as one of the founding fathers of modern symbolic logic is secure for all time, and his claims to greatness as a logician are established to an extent beyond my meagre capacity to alter for better or for worse. Accordingly, it is no real unkindness to Russell’s memory to observe in the interests of historical justice that he, too, once more illustrates the rather trite precept that even scholars of deservedly great stature can exhibit a bias of intellect that produces unfortunate side effects. At any rate, the aim of this present discussion is to note the substantially negative import of Russell’s work for the evolution of modal logic, whose rapid growth since the late 1940s is unquestionably one of the most exciting developments in contemporary logical research.
