Author: Bertrand Russell
Publisher:
Published: 2017-03-23
Total Pages: 236
ISBN-13: 9781544851273
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The following lectures are an attempt to show, by means of examples, the nature, capacity, and limitations of the logical-analytic method in philosophy. This method, of which the first complete example is to be found in the writings of Frege, has gradually, in the course of actual research, increasingly forced itself upon me as something perfectly definite, capable of embodiment in maxims, and adequate, in all branches of philosophy, to yield whatever objective scientific knowledge it is possible to obtain. Most of the methods hitherto practiced have professed to lead to more ambitious results than any that logical analysis can claim to reach, but unfortunately these results have always been such as many competent philosophers considered inadmissible. Regarded merely as hypotheses and as aids to imagination, the great systems of the past serve a very useful purpose, and are abundantly worthy of study. But something different is required if philosophy is to become a science, and to aim at results independent of the tastes and temperament of the philosopher who advocates them. In what follows, I have endeavored to show, however imperfectly, the way by which I believe that this desideratum is to be found. The central problem by which I have sought to illustrate method is the problem of the relation between the crude data of sense and the space, time, and matter of mathematical physics. I have been made aware of the importance of this problem by my friend and collaborator Dr Whitehead, to whom are due almost all the differences between the views advocated here and those suggested in The Problems of Philosophy. I owe to him the definition of points, the suggestion for the treatment of instants and "things," and the whole conception of the world of physics as a construction rather than an inference. What is said on these topics here is, in fact, a rough preliminary account of the more precise results which he is giving in the fourth volume of our Principia Mathematica. It will be seen that if his way of dealing with these topics is capable of being successfully carried through, a wholly new light is thrown on the time-honored controversies of realists and idealists, and a method is obtained of solving all that is soluble in their problem. CONTENTS I. Current Tendencies II. Logic as the Essence of Philosophy III. On our Knowledge of the External World IV. The World of Physics and the World of Sense V. The Theory of Continuity VI. The Problem of Infinity considered Historically VII. The Positive Theory of Infinity VIII. On the Notion of Cause, with Applications to the Free-will Problem
