 The term “logical construction” was used by Bertrand Russell to describe a series of similar philosophical theories beginning with the 1901 “Frege-Russell” definition of numbers as classes and continuing through his “construction” of the notions of space, time and matter after 1914. Philosophers since the 1920s have argued about the significance of “logical construction” as a method in analytic philosophy and proposed various ways of interpreting Russell’s notion. Some were inspired to develop their own projects by examples of constructions. Russell’s notion of logical construction influenced both Carnap’s project of constructing the physical world from experience and Quine’s notion of explication, and was a model for the use of set theoretic reconstructions in formal philosophy later in the twentieth century.