Bringing up Whitehead and Russell indicates you may have somewhat missed the argument here. The point is to be guided by the history, not build up from axioms.

Bringing up Whitehead and Russell indicates you may have somewhat missed the argument here. The point is to be guided by the history, not build up from axioms. Mathematics was not historically built up from axioms! Whitehead and Russell are very recent historically, so you would certainly not start with them (or even get to it at all) by following a historical approach. Essentially this is saying that you can use the sequence of historical discovery as a guide to the appropriate sequence of lies-to-children [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children