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The aspects of
Bertrand Russell's views on philosophy cover the changing viewpoints of philosopher and mathematician
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), from his early writings in 1896 until his death in February 1970.
Russell is generally credited with being one of the founders of
analytic philosophy, but he also produced a body of work that covers logic, the philosophy of mathematics, metaphysics, ethics and
epistemology, including his 1913
Theory of Knowledge and the related article he wrote for the 1926 edition of
Encyclopædia Britannica,
as well as writing popular and (then) controversial work on philosophy
of religion for which he was, in part, awarded the Nobel Prize in 1950.
Analytic philosophy
Bertrand Russell helped to develop what is now called "Analytic Philosophy." Alongside
G. E. Moore, Russell was shown to be partly responsible for the British revolt against
idealism, a philosophy greatly influenced by
G. W. F. Hegel and his British apostle,
F. H. Bradley.
[1] This revolt was echoed 30 years later in
Vienna by the
logical positivists' "revolt against
metaphysics." Russell was particularly critical of a doctrine he ascribed to idealism and
coherentism, which he dubbed the
doctrine of internal relations;
this, Russell suggested, held that to know any particular thing, we
must know all of its relations. Russell argued that this would make
space, time, science and the concept of number not fully intelligible. Russell's logical work with
Whitehead continued this project.
Russell and Moore were devoted to clarity in arguments by
breaking down philosophical position into their simplest components.
Russell, in particular, saw formal logic and science as the principal
tools of the philosopher. Russell did not think we should have separate
methods for philosophy. Russell thought philosophers should strive to
answer the most general of propositions about the world and this would
help eliminate confusions. In particular, he wanted to end what he saw
as the excesses of metaphysics. Russell adopted
William of Ockham's principle against multiplying unnecessary entities,
Occam's Razor, as a central part of the method of analysis.
Logic and philosophy of mathematics
Russell had great influence on modern
mathematical logic. The American philosopher and logician
Willard Quine said Russell's work represented the greatest influence on his own work.
Russell's first mathematical book,
An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry, was published in 1897. This work was heavily influenced by
Immanuel Kant. Russell later realised that the conception it laid out would make Albert Einstein's schema of
space-time impossible. Thenceforth, he rejected the entire
Kantian program as it related to mathematics and
geometry, and rejected his own earliest work on the subject.
Interested in the definition of number, Russell studied the work of
George Boole,
Georg Cantor, and
Augustus De Morgan. Materials in the Bertrand Russell Archives at
McMaster University include notes of his reading in
algebraic logic by
Charles Sanders Peirce and
Ernst Schröder. In 1900 he attended the first
International Congress of Philosophy in Paris, where he became familiar with the work of the Italian mathematician,
Giuseppe Peano. He mastered Peano's new symbolism and his set of
axioms for
arithmetic. Peano defined logically all of the terms of these axioms with the exception of
0,
number,
successor, and the singular term,
the,
which were the primitives of his system. Russell took it upon himself
to find logical definitions for each of these. Between 1897 and 1903 he
published several articles applying Peano's notation to the classical
Boole-Schröder algebra of relations, among them
On the Notion of Order,
Sur la logique des relations avec les applications à la théorie des séries, and
On Cardinal Numbers. He became convinced that the foundations of mathematics could be derived within what has since come to be called
higher-order logic which in turn he believed to include some form of
unrestricted comprehension axiom.
Russell then discovered that Gottlob Frege had independently arrived at equivalent definitions for
0,
successor, and
number, and the definition of number is now usually referred to as the Frege-Russell definition. Russell drew attention to Frege's priority in 1903, when he published
The Principles of Mathematics (see below).
The appendix to this work, however, described a paradox arising from
Frege's application of second- and higher-order functions which took
first-order functions as their arguments, and Russell offered his first
effort to resolve what would henceforth come to be known as the
Russell Paradox. Before writing
Principles, Russell became aware of Cantor's proof that there was no greatest
cardinal number,
which Russell believed was mistaken. The Cantor Paradox in turn was
shown (for example by Crossley) to be a special case of the Russell
Paradox. This caused Russell to analyse
classes,
for it was known that given any number of elements, the number of
classes they result in is greater than their number. This in turn led to
the discovery of a very interesting class, namely, the class of all
classes. It contains two kinds of classes: those classes that contain
themselves, and those that do not. Consideration of this class led him
to find a fatal flaw in the so-called principle of comprehension, which
had been taken for granted by logicians of the time. He showed that it
resulted in a contradiction, whereby Y is a member of Y, if and only if,
Y is not a member of Y. This has become known as
Russell's paradox, the solution to which he outlined in an appendix to
Principles, and which he later developed into a complete theory, the
theory of types. Aside from exposing a major inconsistency in
naive set theory, Russell's work led directly to the creation of modern
axiomatic set theory.
It also crippled Frege's project of reducing arithmetic to logic. The
Theory of Types and much of Russell's subsequent work have also found
practical applications with
computer science and information technology.
Russell continued to defend
logicism, the view that mathematics is in some important sense reducible to logic, and along with his former teacher,
Alfred North Whitehead, wrote the monumental
Principia Mathematica, an
axiomatic system on which all of mathematics can be built. The first volume of the
Principia
was published in 1910, and is largely ascribed to Russell. More than
any other single work, it established the speciality of mathematical or
symbolic logic. Two more volumes were published, but their original plan
to incorporate geometry in a fourth volume was never realised, and
Russell never felt up to improving the original works, though he
referenced new developments and problems in his preface to the second
edition. Upon completing the
Principia, three volumes of extraordinarily
abstract and complex reasoning, Russell was exhausted, and he felt his intellectual faculties never fully recovered from the effort. Although the
Principia did not fall prey to the
paradoxes in Frege's approach, it was later proven by
Kurt Gödel that neither
Principia Mathematica,
nor any other consistent system of primitive recursive arithmetic,
could, within that system, determine that every proposition that could
be formulated within that system was decidable, i.e. could decide
whether that proposition or its negation was provable within the system
(See:
Gödel's incompleteness theorem).
Russell's last significant work in mathematics and logic,
Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, was written while he was in
jail for his
anti-war activities during
World War I. This was largely an explication of his previous work and its philosophical significance.
Philosophy of language
Russell made language, or more specifically,
how we use language, a central part of philosophy, and this influenced
Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Gilbert Ryle,
J. L. Austin, and
P. F. Strawson,
among others, who used many of the techniques that Russell originally
developed. Russell, and GE Moore, argued that clarity of expression is a
virtue.
A significant contribution to
philosophy of language is Russell's
theory of descriptions, set out in
On Denoting (
Mind, 1905).
Frank P. Ramsey
described this paper as "a paradigm of philosophy." The theory
considers the sentence "The present King of France is bald" and whether
the proposition is false or meaningless.
Frege
had argued, employing his distinction between sense and reference, that
such sentences were meaningful but neither true nor false. Russell
argues that the grammatical form of the sentence disguises its
underlying
logical form.
Russell's Theory of Definite Descriptions enables the sentence to be
construed as meaningful but false, without commitment to the existence
of any present King of France. This addresses a paradox of great
antiquity (e.g. "That which is not must in some sense be. Otherwise, how
could we say of it that it is not?" etc.), going back at least as far
as
Parmenides. In Russell's own time,
Meinong held the view of that which is not being in some sense real; and Russell held this view prior to
On Denoting.
The problem is general to what are called "
definite descriptions."
Normally this includes all terms beginning with "the," and sometimes
includes names, like "Walter Scott." (This point is quite contentious:
Russell sometimes thought that the latter terms shouldn't be called
names at all, but only "disguised definite descriptions," but much
subsequent work has treated them as altogether different things.) What
is the "
logical form" of definite descriptions: how, in Frege's terms, could we paraphrase them to show how the
truth
of the whole depends on the truths of the parts? Definite descriptions
appear to be like names that by their very nature denote exactly one
thing, neither more nor less. What, then, are we to say about the
proposition as a whole if one of its parts apparently isn't functioning
correctly?
Russell's
solution
was, first of all, to analyse not the term alone but the entire
proposition that contained a definite description. "The present king of
France is bald," he then suggested, can be reworded to "There is an x
such that x is a present king of France, nothing other than x is a
present king of France, and x is bald." Russell claimed that each
definite description in fact contains a claim of
existence
and a claim of uniqueness which give this appearance, but these can be
broken apart and treated separately from the predication that is the
obvious content of the proposition. The proposition as a whole then says
three things about some object: the definite description contains two
of them, and the rest of the
sentence
contains the other. If the object does not exist, or if it is not
unique, then the whole sentence turns out to be false, not meaningless.
One of the major complaints against Russell's theory, due originally to
Strawson, is that definite descriptions do not claim that their object exists, they merely presuppose that it does.
Wittgenstein, Russell's student, achieved considerable prominence
in the philosophy of language after the posthumous publication of the
Philosophical Investigations.
In Russell's opinion, Wittgenstein's later work was misguided, and he
decried its influence and that of its followers (especially members of
the so-called "Oxford school" of
ordinary language philosophy, who he believed were promoting a kind of
mysticism). He wrote a foreword to
Ernest Gellner's
Words and Things
which was a fierce attack on the Oxford School of Ordinary Language
philosophy and Wittgenstein's later work and was supportive of Gellner
in the subsequent academic dispute. However, Russell still held
Wittgenstein and his early work in high regard, he thought of him as,
"perhaps the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as
traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense, and dominating."
Russell's belief that philosophy's task is not limited to examining
ordinary language is once again widely accepted in philosophy.
Logical atomism
Russell explained his philosophy of
logical atomism in a set of lectures, "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism", which he gave in 1918.
In these lectures, Russell sets forth his concept of an ideal,
isomorphic language, one that would mirror the world, whereby our
knowledge can be reduced to terms of atomic propositions and their
truth-functional
compounds. Logical atomism is a form of radical empiricism, for Russell
believed the most important requirement for such an ideal language is
that every meaningful proposition must consist of terms referring
directly to the objects with which we are acquainted, or that they are
defined by other terms referring to objects with which we are
acquainted. Russell excluded some formal, logical terms such as
all,
the,
is,
and so forth, from his isomorphic requirement, but he was never
entirely satisfied with our understanding of such terms. One of the
central themes of Russell's atomism is that the world consists of
logically independent facts, a plurality of facts, and that our
knowledge depends on the data of our direct experience of them.
In his later life, Russell came to doubt aspects of logical atomism,
especially his principle of isomorphism, though he continued to believe
that the process of philosophy ought to consist of breaking things down
into their simplest components, even though we might not ever fully
arrive at an ultimate atomic fact.
Epistemology
Russell's
epistemology went through many phases. Once he shed
neo-Hegelianism in his early years, Russell remained a
philosophical realist for the remainder of his life, believing that our direct experiences have primacy in the acquisition of knowledge.
While some of his views have lost favour, his influence remains strong
in the distinction between two ways in which we can be familiar with
objects: "
knowledge by acquaintance" and "
knowledge by description". For a time, Russell thought that we could only be acquainted with our own
sense data—momentary
perceptions of colours, sounds, and the like—and that everything else,
including the physical objects that these were sense data
of, could only be inferred, or reasoned to—i.e. known by description—and not known directly. This distinction has gained much wider application, though Russell eventually rejected the idea of an intermediate sense datum.
In his later philosophy, Russell subscribed to a kind of
neutral monism,
maintaining that the distinctions between the material and mental
worlds, in the final analysis, were arbitrary, and that both can be
reduced to a neutral property—a view similar to one held by the American
philosopher/psychologist,
William James, and one that was first formulated by
Baruch Spinoza, whom Russell greatly admired.
Instead of James' "pure experience," however, Russell characterised the
stuff of our initial states of perception as "events," a stance which
is curiously akin to his old teacher
Whitehead's process philosophy.
Philosophy of science
Russell claimed that he was more convinced of his
method
of doing philosophy than of his philosophical conclusions. Science was
one of the principal components of analysis. Russell was a believer in
the
scientific method,
that science reaches only tentative answers, that scientific progress
is piecemeal, and attempts to find organic unities were largely futile. He believed the same was true of philosophy. Russell held that the ultimate objective of
both science and philosophy was to
understand reality, not simply to make predictions.
Russell's work contributed to
philosophy of science's development into a separate branch of philosophy. Much of Russell's thinking about science is expressed in his 1914 book,
Our Knowledge of the External World as a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy, which influenced the
logical positivists.
Russell held that of the physical world we know only its abstract
structure except for the intrinsic character of our own brain with
which we have direct acquaintance (Russell, 1948). Russell said
that he had always assumed copunctuality between percepts and
non-percepts, and percepts were also part of the physical world, a part
of which we knew its intrinsic character directly, knowledge which goes
beyond structure. His views on science have become integrated into the
contemporary debate in the philosophy of science as a form of Structural
Realism, people such as Elie Zahar and Ioannis Votsis have discussed
the implications of his work for our understanding of science. The
seminal article "The Concept of Structure in The Analysis of Matter" by William Demopoulos and Michael Friedman was crucial in reintegrating Russell's views to the contemporary scene.
Russell wrote several science books, including The ABC of Atoms (1923) and The ABC of Relativity (1925).
Ethics
While
Russell wrote a great deal on ethical subject matters, he did not
believe that the subject belonged to philosophy or that when he wrote on
ethics that he did so in his capacity as a philosopher. In his earlier
years, Russell was greatly influenced by
G.E. Moore's
Principia Ethica. Along with Moore, he then believed that moral facts were
objective, but known only through
intuition;
that they were simple properties of objects, not equivalent (e.g.,
pleasure is good) to the natural objects to which they are often
ascribed;
and that these simple, undefinable moral properties cannot be analysed
using the non-moral properties with which they are associated. In time,
however, he came to agree with his philosophical hero,
David Hume, who believed that ethical terms dealt with
subjective values that cannot be verified in the same way as matters of fact.
Coupled with Russell's other doctrines, this influenced the
logical positivists, who formulated the theory of
emotivism or
non-cognitivism, which states that ethical propositions (along with those of
metaphysics) were essentially meaningless and nonsensical or, at best, little more than expressions of
attitudes and
preferences.
Notwithstanding his influence on them, Russell himself did not construe
ethical propositions as narrowly as the positivists, for he believed
that ethical considerations are not only meaningful, but that they are a
vital subject matter for civil discourse. Indeed, though Russell was
often characterised as the
patron saint of rationality, he agreed with Hume, who said that reason ought to be subordinate to ethical considerations.
In terms of his normative ethical beliefs, Russell considered himself a
utilitarian early in his life.
Religion and theology
For most of his adult life Russell maintained that religion is little more than
superstition
and, despite any positive effects that religion might have, it is
largely harmful to people. He believed religion and the religious
outlook (he considered communism and other systematic
ideologies
to be forms of religion) serve to impede knowledge, foster fear and
dependency, and are responsible for much of the war, oppression, and
misery that have beset the world.
In his 1949 speech, "Am I an Atheist or an Agnostic?", Russell expressed his difficulty over whether to call himself an
atheist or an agnostic:
As a philosopher, if I were
speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to
describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a
conclusive argument by which one can prove that there is not a God. On
the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary
man in the street I think that I ought to say that I am an Atheist,
because, when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought
to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods.
— Bertrand Russell, Collected Papers, vol. 11, p. 91
However, in the
1948 BBC Radio Debate between Bertrand Russell and
Frederick Copleston,
Russell chose to assume the position of the agnostic, though it seems
to have been because he admitted to not being able to prove the
non-existence of God:
Copleston: Well, my position is the
affirmative position that such a being actually exists, and that His
existence can be proved philosophically. Perhaps you would tell me if
your position is that of agnosticism or of atheism. I mean, would you
say that the non-existence of God can be proved?
Russell: No, I should not say that: my position is agnostic.
— Bertrand Russell v. Fr. Copleston, 1948 BBC Radio Debate on the Existence of God
Though he would later question God's existence, he fully accepted the
ontological argument during his undergraduate years:
For two or three years...I was a Hegelian.
I remember the exact moment during my fourth year [in 1894] when I
became one. I had gone out to buy a tin of tobacco, and was going back
with it along Trinity Lane, when I suddenly threw it up in the air and
exclaimed: "Great God in Boots! – the ontological argument is sound!"
— Bertrand Russell, Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, pg. 60
This quote has been used by many theologians over the years, such as by
Louis Pojman in his
Philosophy of Religion,
who wish for readers to believe that even a well-known
atheist-philosopher supported this particular argument for God's
existence. However, elsewhere in his autobiography, Russell also
mentions:
About two years later, I became convinced that there is no life after death, but I still believed in God, because the "First Cause" argument appeared to be irrefutable. At the age of eighteen, however, shortly before I went to Cambridge, I read Mill's Autobiography,
where I found a sentence to the effect that his father taught him the
question "Who made me?" cannot be answered, since it immediately
suggests the further question "Who made God?" This led me to abandon the
"First Cause" argument, and to become an atheist.
— Bertrand Russell, Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, pg. 36
Russell made an influential analysis of the
omphalos hypothesis enunciated by
Philip Henry Gosse—that
any argument suggesting that the world was created as if it were
already in motion could just as easily make it a few minutes old as a
few thousand years:
There is no
logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into
being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that
"remembered" a wholly unreal past. There is no logically necessary
connection between events at different times; therefore nothing that is
happening now or will happen in the future can disprove the hypothesis
that the world began five minutes ago.
— Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind, 1921, pp. 159–60; cf. Philosophy, Norton, 1927, p. 7, where Russell acknowledges Gosse's paternity of this anti-evolutionary argument.
As a young man, Russell had a decidedly religious bent, himself, as is evident in his early
Platonism. He longed for
eternal truths, as he makes clear in his famous essay,
"A Free Man's Worship", widely regarded as a masterpiece of prose, but a work that Russell came to dislike. While he rejected the
supernatural, he freely admitted that he yearned for a deeper meaning to life.
His conclusion:
Religion is based, I think,
primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown
and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of
elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes.
[...] A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not
need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free
intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men.
— Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects
Influence on philosophy
As Nicholas Griffin points out in the introduction to
The Cambridge Companion to Bertrand Russell,
Russell had a major influence on modern philosophy, especially in the
English-speaking world. While others were also influential, notably
Frege,
Moore, and
Wittgenstein,
Russell made analysis the dominant methodology of professional
philosophy. The various analytic movements throughout the last century
all owe something to Russell's earlier works. Even Russell's biographer,
the philosopher Ray Monk, no admirer of Russell's personal snobbery,
characterised his work on the philosophy of mathematics as intense,
august and incontestably great
and acknowledged, in the preface to the second volume of his biography,
that he is one of the indisputably great philosophers of the twentieth
century.
Russell's influence on individual philosophers is singular, especially in the case of
Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was his student between 1911 and 1914.
Wittgenstein had an important influence on Russell as he himself discusses in his
My Philosophical Development. He led him, for example, to conclude, much to his regret, that mathematical truths were purely
tautological truths, however it is doubtful that Wittgenstein actually held this view, which he discussed in relation to
logical truth,
since it is not clear that he was a logicist when he wrote the
Tractatus. What is certain is that in 1901 Russell's own reflections on
the issues raised by the paradox that takes his name
Russell's paradox,
led him to doubt the intuitive certainty of mathematics. This doubt was
perhaps Russell's most important 'influence' on mathematics, and was
spread throughout the European universities, even as Russell himself
laboured (with
Alfred North Whitehead) in an attempt to solve the Paradox and related paradoxes, such as Burali-Forti. As Stewart Shapiro explains in his
Thinking About Mathematics,
Russell's attempts to solve the paradoxes led to the ramified theory of
types, which, though it is highly complex and relies on the doubtful
axiom of reducibility, actually manages to solve both syntactic and
semantic paradoxes at the expense of rendering the logicist project
suspect and introducing much complexity in the PM system. Philosopher
and logician F.P. Ramsey would later simplify the theory of types
arguing that there was no need to solve both semantic and syntactic
paradoxes to provide a foundation for mathematics. The philosopher and
logician George Boolos discusses the power of the PM system in the
preface to his
Logic, logic & logic, stating that it is
powerful enough to derive most classical mathematics, equating the power
of PM to that of Z, a weaker form of set theory than ZFC
(Zermelo-Fraenkel Set theory with Choice). In fact, ZFC actually does
circumvent Russell's paradox by restricting the comprehension axiom to
already existing sets by the use of subset axioms.
Russell wrote (in Portraits from Memory, 1956) of his reaction to Gödel's 'Theorems of Undecidability':
I wanted certainty in the kind of
way in which people want religious faith. I thought that certainty is
more likely to be found in mathematics than elsewhere. But I discovered
that many mathematical demonstrations, which my teachers wanted me to
accept, were full of fallacies ... I was continually reminded of the
fable about the elephant and the tortoise. Having constructed an
elephant upon which the mathematical world could rest, I found the
elephant tottering, and proceeded to construct a tortoise to keep the
elephant from falling. But the tortoise was no more secure than the
elephant, and after some twenty years of arduous toil, I came to the
conclusion that there was nothing more that I could do in the way of
making mathematical knowledge indubitable.
Evidence of Russell's influence on Wittgenstein can be seen throughout the
Tractatus, which Russell was instrumental in having published. Russell also helped to secure Wittgenstein's doctorate and a faculty position at
Cambridge, along with several fellowships along the way.
However, as previously stated, he came to disagree with Wittgenstein's
later linguistic and analytic approach to philosophy dismissing it as
"trivial", while Wittgenstein came to think of Russell as "superficial
and glib", particularly in his popular writings. However, Norman Malcolm
tells us in his recollections of Wittgenstein that Wittgenstein showed a
deference towards Russell such as he never saw him show towards any
one, and even went so far as to reprimand students of his who criticised
Russell. As Ray Monk relates in his biography of Wittgenstein,
Wittgenstein used to say that Russell's books should be bound in two
covers, those dealing with mathematical philosophy in blue, and every
student of philosophy should read them, while those dealing with popular
subjects should be bound in red and no one should be allowed to read
them.
Russell often characterised his moral and political writings as
lying outside the scope of philosophy, but Russell's admirers and
detractors are often more acquainted with his pronouncements on social
and political matters, or what some (e.g., biographer
Ray Monk)
have called his "journalism," than they are with his technical,
philosophical work. There is a marked tendency to conflate these
matters, and to judge Russell the philosopher on what he himself would
definitely consider to be his non-philosophical opinions. Russell often
cautioned people to make this distinction. Beginning in the 1920s,
Russell wrote frequently for
The Nation on changing morals,
disarmament and literature. In 1965, he wrote that the magazine "...has been one of the few voices which has been heard on behalf of
individual liberty and
social justice consistently throughout its existence."
Russell left a large assortment of writing. From his adolescent
years, he wrote about 3,000 words a day, with relatively few
corrections; his first draft nearly always was his last, even on the
most complex, technical matters. His previously unpublished work is an
immense treasure trove, and scholars continue to gain new insights into
Russell's thought.
