Philosophical
work
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 Encyclopedia Britannica.
1) Analytic philosophy
Russell is one of the founders of what later became called ‘analytic philosophy’. At the beginning of the
20th century, alongside G. E. Moore, Russell was largely responsible for the
British "revolt against Idealism," a philosophy greatly influenced by
G.
W. F. Hegel and his British apostle, F. H.
Bradley. 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 in order 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 and Moore strove to eliminate what they saw as
meaningless and incoherent assertions in philosophy. They sought clarity and
precision in argument by the use of exact language and by
breaking down philosophical propositions into their simplest
grammatical components. Russell, in particular, saw formal logic and science as the principal
tools of the philosopher. Indeed, unlike most of the generation of philosophers
who preceded him and his early contemporaries, Russell did not believe there
was a separate method for philosophy. He believed that the main task of the
philosopher was to illuminate the most general propositions about the world and to
eliminate confusion. In particular, he wanted to end what he saw as the
excesses of metaphysics.
2) 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.
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. Peano defined logically all of the terms of the 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'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.
3) Philosophy of language
Russell made language, or more specifically, ‘how we use languag’ , 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.
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. Definite descriptions appear to be
like names that by their very nature denote exactly one thing, neither more nor
less.
Russell's solution
was, first of all, to analyze 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
Russell’s belief that philosophy's task is not limited to examining
ordinary language is once again widely accepted in philosophy.
4) Philosophy of science
Russell's work contributed to philosophy of science's development into a
separate branch of philosophy.
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 said that he had always assumed co punctuality 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.
5) Philosophy of Education:
Until the nineteenth century, education
was exclusively for children of the aristocracy and of wealthy families. Russell strongly criticized it, saying, “Such
method of education is only available to the privileged class. It has no place in an egalitarian
society.” He goes on to say: “Education
should take a form that enables it to be available to all children or at least all children capable of
benefiting from it. The education system
we should aim for is one in which every boy and every girl are given the
opportunity to attain the highest level of education in this world.”
“Children capable of benefiting” are obviously not limited to children of
the aristocracy; working class children are also included. Also included are children with special
needs, such as handicapped children.
Russell argues that, not only should all children be given equal
opportunities to receive the best possible education, but individuals with
special needs should be given specific education. Russell points out the
dispute “whether education is for practicality or for embellishment; whether
education should focus on technical skills that would train a merchant or a
professional as quickly as possible. We
are faced with the problem whether education shall aim for packing the
children’s brains with practical knowledge or giving them intellectual
treasures.” Russell opposed dividing the society into practicality and
embellishment. He argues that both types
of knowledge should be provided.
Children should acquire knowledge for material gain as well as knowledge
for intellectual pleasure. Education
should have both utility and humanity as components.
6) Russell's Social and Political
Philosophy
Russell's social influence stems from three main sources: his long-standing
social activism, his many writings on the social and political issues of his
day, and his popularizations of numerous technical writings in philosophy and
the natural sciences.
Naturally enough, Russell saw a link between education, in this broad
sense, and social progress. As he put it, “Education is the key to the new
world” (1926, 83). Partly this is due to our need to understand nature, but
equally important is our need to understand each other.
The thing, above all, that a teacher should
endeavor to produce in his pupils, if democracy is to survive, is the kind of
tolerance that springs from an endeavor to understand those who are different
from ourselves.
At the same time, Russell is also famous for suggesting that a widespread
reliance upon evidence, rather than upon superstition, would have enormous
social consequences: “I wish to propose for the reader's favourable
consideration,” says Russell, “a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly
paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is
undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for
supposing it true”.
Logical atomism
Perhaps Russell's most systematic, metaphysical treatment of philosophical
analysis and his empiricist-centric logicism is evident in what he called logical
atomism, which is explicated 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 believes 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. 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 data,
momentary perceptions of colors, 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.
Russell's Neutral Monism
One final major contribution to philosophy was Russell's defense of neutral monism,
the view that the world consists of just one type of substance that is neither
exclusively mental nor exclusively physical. Like idealism (the view that there
exists nothing but the mental) and physicalism (the view that there exists
nothing but the physical), neutral monism rejects dualism (the view that there
exist distinct mental and physical substances). However, unlike both idealism
and physicalism, neutral monism holds that this single existing substance may
be viewed in some contexts as being mental and in others as being physical. As
Russell puts it,
“Neutral monism” as opposed to idealistic monism and materialistic monism, is
the theory that the things commonly regarded as mental and the things commonly
regarded as physical do not differ in respect of any intrinsic property
possessed by the one set and not by the other, but differ only in respect of arrangement
and context.”
Influence on philosophy
As Nicholas Griffin discusses 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 Ray Monk, no admirer of Russell as a person,
characterized 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.
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