Patrick Comerford
I think I need a haircut, and there is no shortage of barbers in Stony Stratford to pick and choose from. But when I was thinking about the Hotel Russell and Russell Square in a blog posting yesterday (18 August 2026), I was reminded of the ‘Barber’s Paradox’.
I ask you to imagine a village that has only one barber who shaves all men, and only those men, who do not shave themselves.
At first glance, this seems like a perfectly reasonable way to run a business in a small town. The men who want to save money shave themselves at home, and the rest go to the barber. But the scenario begins to fall apart when you ask: ‘Who shaves the barber?’
If the barber shaves himself, he violates the communal understanding that he only shaves people who do not shave themselves. Therefore, he cannot shave himself. But if he does not shave himself, he falls into the category of the men in the village who do not shave themselves.
According to the principle, the barber must shave everyone in this category. Therefore, he must shave himself. He needs to shave himself if – and only if – he does not shave himself. This creates a conundrum and an infinite, unbreakable loop of contradiction.
The reason a village with these rules cannot exist in real life has nothing to do with physics, geography, or human behaviour. It cannot exist because the rule itself is a logical contradiction.
Asking me to find such a village is like asking me to draw a four-sided triangle, to square the circle, to find a married bachelor, or to calculate the square root of -1. The words in the definition cancel each other out. The barber who is defined by such an exact, unbending parameter is a mathematical impossibility masquerading as a physical person. As soon as I define the parameters of the village, I have defined a place that cannot logically exist in the universe.
The ‘barber’s paradox’ reminds me of Epimenides (Ἐπιμενίδης) of Knossos, the semi-mythical philosopher and poet from Crete who is said to have lived in the 7th or 6th century BCE, who gives his name to the ‘Epimenides Paradox’, a variation of the ‘Liar Paradox’.
It is said that while Epimenides was tending his father’s sheep, he fell asleep for 57 years in a cave in Crete that was sacred to Zeus. When he awoke after 57 years, Epimenides is said to have found he was endowed the gift of prophecy.
Epimenides is quoted twice in the New Testament. While speaking to a group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers in front of the Areopagus in Athens (see Acts 17: 22-34), Saint Paul quotes from Epimenides’ Cretica: ‘In him we live and move and have our being’ (verse 28). Saint Paul is citing the fourth line in the Hymn to Zeus of Callimachus, with its reference to one of ‘your own poets’ (Acts 17: 28). In the same address, Saint Paul also quotes from Aratus’ Phaenomena: ‘For we too are his offspring’ (verse 28).
When Saint Paul spoke to Saint Titus about his mission in Crete, he committed a logical fallacy by quoting Epimenides: ‘It was one of them, their very own prophet, who said, ‘Cretans are always liars, vicious brutes, lazy gluttons.’ That testimony is true’ (Titus 1: 12-13a).
The ‘lie’ of the Cretans is that Zeus was mortal, for Epimenides believed that Zeus is dead. The logical inconsistency of a Cretan asserting all Cretans are always liars may not have occurred to Epimenides, nor to Callimachus, who both used the phrase to emphasise their point, without irony.
However, Saint Paul must have thought long about the idea of a dead god and whether the god’s tomb was dead as he sought to preach the Resurrection in Crete.
Epimenides is first identified as the ‘prophet’ in Titus 1: 12 by Clement of Alexandria (Stromata 1, 14). Clement mentions that ‘some say’ Epimenides should be counted among the seven wisest philosophers.
However, it is not clear when Epimenides became associated with the Epimenides paradox, a variation of the liar paradox. Saint Augustine restates the closely related liar paradox in Against the Academicians (III.13.29), but he does so without mentioning Epimenides. In the Middle Ages, many forms of the liar paradox were studied under the heading of insolubilia, but they were not associated with Epimenides.
Epimenides Street is a street I know well in the old town of Rethymnon in Crete. Is it paradoxical that I I have found the restaurateurs and tavern owners of Epimenidou Street, like all their fellow Cretans, to be truthful and honest? Many years ago, back in the 1980s, as I entrusted someone in Rethymnon with my wallet and valuables as I went for a swim, I was advised that it was tourists and foreigners I needed to watch out for.
The ‘barber’s paradox’, which retells the ‘liar’s paradox’ or the Epimenides paradox, is also a retelling of ‘Russell’s Paradox’, which was formulated by the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) in 1901. Russell articulated a massive flaw he had just discovered in logic, now known as ‘Russell’s Paradox’ and, at the time, it must have seemed to many that he had broken the foundations of mathematics.
Mathematicians in those days believed that a ‘set’ could be defined by any condition you could describe. Russell used the paradox to prove that naive set theory was fundamentally broken. If you can define a set as ‘the set of all sets that do not contain themselves’, you create the exact same mathematical paradox as the barber.
Russell’s thought experiment forced the entire field of mathematics to rewrite its foundational axioms to prevent self-contradicting sets from being formed.
At times I am reminded of ‘Russell’s Paradox’ when I walk along Bury Place, close to the British Museum on Great Russell Street, and see a Blue Plaque that reads: ‘Bertrand Russell 1872-1970 Philosopher and Campaigner for Peace lived here in flat No 34 1911-1916’. The building was originally ‘No 3 Russell Chambers’ and is now labelled ‘Russell Chambers, Flats 25-36’.
Russell moved into an unfurnished flat No 34 at Russell Chambers in November 1911 to be close to Lady Ottoline Morrell (1873-1938), the literary society hostess who lived nearby at 44 Bedford Square in Bloomsbury. Ottoline met Russell for the first time since childhood at his home in Bagley Wood in September 1908, but their affair did not begin until 1911.
Much of the Bloomsbury area of London has been owned by Russell’s cousins, the Dukes of Bedford, for centuries. Russell’s grandfather, Lord John Russell, was a younger son of the sixth duke. The Bedford Estates still own large sections of Bloomsbury, and many of the names of the streets, squares, hotels, apartment buildings and a tube station reflect the family’s names and titles, including Russell, Bedford, Tavistock and Woburn.
Bertrand Russell had lived mainly at Trinity College Cambridge, where he was a fellow. But he took lodgings in Ipsden to be near Ottoline in the Chilterns in July 1911. She helped him to furnish the flat he rented in Bury Street, near the British Museum.
Russell chose the flat himself after looking at flats on Wells Street, off Oxford Street. The fourth floor flat in the red brick building measured 754 sq feet, and had a reception room, a main bedroom, a bathroom, kitchen, and a small room off the kitchen that was used as a study, a sitting room and a bedroom.
Among the guests there was the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein who stayed there on 3 October 1913. Russell wrote to Ottoline: ‘Wittgenstein stayed last night and read me bits of work he has done.’
Russell let TS Eliot and his wife Vivien use the room off the kitchen in 1915 because they were ‘desperately poor’. Vivien’s brother Maurice Haigh-Wood (1896-1980) described it as ‘a tiny cupboard room behind the kitchen’ and since Vivien had brought ‘a single cot-bed’ to furnish it, Eliot ‘slept in the hallway in a deck-chair’.
Russell was dismissed from Trinity College Cambridge in 1916 because of his opposition to World War I and so he lost his main source of income. His affair with Ottoline was also ending, and his affair with Constance (Colette) Malleson was beginning. He moved from Russell Chambers in April to rooms in 46 Gordon Square and then in August to 57 Gordon Square. He sub-let his Russell Chambers flat, and eventually went to prison that year as a pacifist.
After World War I, Russell considered keeping on the flat for his own use but concluded he could not afford it. Frank Swinnerton, an author and editor at Chatto and Windus, was a tenant at Russell Chambers until 1923, paying Russell 3 guineas a week for the furnished flat until Russell’s involvement with the first and the last home that was his alone formally came to an end.
Meanwhile, Russell was reinstated by Trinity College Cambridge in 1919, resigned in 1920, was Tarner Lecturer in 1926 and became a Fellow again in 1944-1949. He had succeeded as 3rd Earl Russell in 1931 and many of my age and generation rememember him not only as a philosopher but as active pacifist and a leading figure in CND, the Committee of 100 and the Aldermaston marches. He died on 2 February 1970.
Russell Chambers was selected by English Heritage for a blue plaque commemorating Bertrand Russell. The plaque was unveiled by his son Conrad Russell (1937-2004), 5th Earl Russell, on 6 June 2002.
As for the Barber’s Paradox, the popular retelling of Russell’s Paradox, it collapses with all its presupposition if the only barber in the village is a woman. She can shave as many men – and women – she wants to without any concerns about philosophical parameters.
I never had that haircut today. I must choose one of the barber shops in Stony Stratford to visit tomorrow.
