Russell B. The Art of Rational Conjecture // The Art of Philosophizing and Other Essays. — New York : Philosophical Library, 1968.

The eminent British philosopher Bertrand Arthur William Russell (born 18 May 1872, died 2 February 1970) studied philosophy and mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, and subsequently held posts at Cambridge and various other major universities, interspersed with periods devoted to political, educational, and literary pursuits. He was author of numerous influential books and papers on philosophy, politics, and education. Few philosophers of science have had as strong a scientific background as Russell. His mathematical training at (...) Cambridge was almost entirely in applied mathematics which was largely physics. (shrink)

Russell examines the foundations of knowledge through a discussion of language and investigates the way a knowledge of the structure of language helps our understanding of the structure of the world.

The original 1907 text of James' Pragmatism is accompanied with a series of critical essays from scholars including Moore and Russell. In the introduction Olin evaluates the strength of the criticisms made against James.

No sólo los especialistas en filosofía, sino también las personas interesadas en los problemas del hombre y su futuro, recibieron periódicos testimonios de la capacidad de BERTRAND RUSSELL (1872-1970) para enfrentarse, a lo largo de su dilatada y fecunda vida, con todo tipo de cuestiones, desde las muy técnicas de la teoría del conocimiento o la filosofía matemática, hasta las de la justicia y moralidad de los regímenes políticos, de los conflictos bélicos y de los sistemas sociales. Este (...) volumen de ENSAYOS FILOSÓFICOS reúne varios escritos sobre la ética, la historia y la verdad, de los que revisten singular interés los trabajos dedicados a la exposición y análisis de las concepciones acerca de la verdad y falsedad, tal como fueron expuestas por William James, y a la crítica general del pragmatismo. (shrink)

The ideal of critical thinking is a central one in Russell's philosophy, though this is not yet generally recognized in the literature on critical thinking. For Russell, the ideal is embedded in the fabric of philosophy, science, liberalism and rationality, and this paper reconstructs Russell's account, which is scattered throughout numerous papers and books. It appears that he has developed a rich conception, involving a complex set of skills, dispositions and attitudes, which together delineate a virtue which (...) has both intellectual and moral aspects. It is a view which is rooted in Russell's epistemological conviction that knowledge is difficult but not impossible to attain, and in his ethical conviction that freedom and independence in inquiry are vital. Russell's account anticipates many of the insights to be found in the recent critical thinking literature, and his views on critical thinking are of enormous importance in understanding the nature of educational aims. Moreover, it is argued that Russell manages to avoid many of the objections which have been raised against recent accounts. With respect to impartiality, thinking for oneself, the importance of feelings and relational skills, the connection with action, and the problem of generalizability, Russell shows a deep understanding of problems and issues which have been at the forefront of recent debate. (shrink)

The Analysis of Matter is perhaps best known for marking Russell's rejection of phenomenalism and his development of a variety of Lockean representationalism–-Russell's causal theory of perception. This occupies Part 2 of the work. Part 1, which is certainly less well known, contains many observations on twentieth-century physics. Unfortunately, Russell's discussion of relativity and the foundations of physical geometry is carried out in apparent ignorance of Reichenbach's and Carnap's investigations in the same period. The issue of conventionalism (...) in its then contemporary form is simply not discussed. The only writers of the period who appear to have had any influence on Russell's conception of the philosophical issues raised by relativity were Whitehead and Eddington. Even the work of A. A. Robb fails to receive any extended discussion;1 although Robb's causal theory is certainly relevant to many of Russell's concerns, especially those voiced in Part 3, regarding the construction of points and the topology of space-time. In the case of quantum mechanics, the idiosyncrasy of Russell's selection of topics is more understandable, since the Heisenberg and Schrödinger theories were only just discovered. Nevertheless, it seems bizarre to a contemporary reader that Russell should have given such emphasis2 to G. N. Lewis's suggestion that an atom emits light only when there is another atom to receive it–-a suggestion reminiscent of Leibniz, and one to which Russell frequently returns. In short, the philosophical problems of modern physics with which Russell deals seem remote from the perspective of post-positivist philosophy of physics. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explain the significance of Alfred A. Robb’s philosophy of time stemming from his interpretation of relativity theory; and at the same time, to investigate the reasons for the failure of his philosophical contemporaries to appreciate its significance, with special attention to its reception on Russell’s part. The study of Russell’s reaction to Robb exposes shortcomings in Russell’s own philosophy of time, which has been extremely influential through the years. It also (...) highlights the philosophical differences between Minkowski and Robb, the shared idealistic premises of Russell and McTaggart, and the confluences between the views of Russell, Eddington and McTaggart. The paper closes with an account of how Robb’s interpretation has been vindicated by its adoption in modern physics. (shrink)

In preparation for his lectures on Leibniz delivered in Cambridge in Lent Term 1899, Russell started in the summer of 1898 to keep notes on writings by and about Leibniz in a large notebook of the type he commonly used for notetaking at this time. This article prints, with annotation, all the material on Leibniz in that notebook.

This volume is one of the most significant documents on the thought of the giant of the twentieth-century philosophy. Russell's 'Reply to Criticisms, ' supplemented by a 1971 'Addendum, ' displays his unrivalled clarity, perceptiveness, and scalpel-like wit, on topics ranging from mathematical logic to political philosophy, from epistemology to philosophy of history.

Traces the life and career of the controversial British philosopher and pacifist and describes his contribution to mathematics, philosophy, and the anti-nuclear movement.

Russell's concept of the self as relevant to semantics, distinct from the psychological concept, evolved from a judger with no complexity of relevance to semantics to a mind with much relevant complexity. The evolution transformed his semantic conceptions: He reassessed what constitutes intentionality, giving up his theory of acquaintance as the aboriginal intentional relation, favoring a contextually constituted intentionality in his theory of neutral monism. His anti-idealism extricated itself from an unwarranted antirepresentationalism. Truth went from being an adverb of (...) acts to an adjective of propositions. He formulated a theory of singular knowledge based on a relation of noticing that anticipated Kaplan's "vivid Names." But, although he saw that the judger-adjudged relation could not account for a judgment's unity, he did not discover what did unify it. Stenius and Geach discovered it in that complex state of the judger which underlies the judgment's verb. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:_Russell_ journal (home office): E:CPBRRUSSJOURTYPE2502\REVIEWS.252 : 2006-02-27 11:52  Reviews FREEDOM ISN’T ACADEMIC W B Educational Studies / U. of British Columbia Vancouver, , Canada   .@. Conrad Russell. An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Liberalism. London: Duckworth, . Pp. . £. (hb). Academic Freedom. London and New York: Routledge, . Pp. xi, . £. (pb). ho is the intelligent person of the first title? Is it the (...) brainy reader who Wknows about liberalism, and merely wants to update her knowledge? Is it the clever author who offers a guide out of the goodness of his heart? Or more likely, is it the sharp publisher, who knows a good selling point when he or she sees one? One guesses it is the publisher. But as to the present volume, few will complain of the title’s ambiguity, for it entices readers into an compact, well written, and timely argument on political matters of the first importance. Conrad Russell was the author of Academic Freedom, a well regarded and similarly compressed discussion of academic freedom. Academic Freedom preceded the Guide to Liberalism by six years. It was as though Russell had first to taste and see the awful effects of neo-conservatism in his beloved University of  Conrad Russell has a world reputation as an historian of the English Civil War, of the whole seventeenth century, and of the social history of politics before . His several books and hundreds of articles and reviews show that he had an apparently effortless mastery of most world history since the Reformation. I have been unable to deal with Conrad’s historical output in this review, but have discussed it in a forthcoming biographical essay about Conrad Russell in the Bertrand Russell Society Quarterly, “Conrad Russell as Political Intellectual”, forthcoming in . _Russell_ journal (home office): E:CPBRRUSSJOURTYPE2502\REVIEWS.252 : 2006-02-27 11:52 Reviews  London and then, six years later—after due reflection upon the whole horrid mess—to provide a compelling political remedy to the evil apparatus of Mrs. Thatcher and Mr. Major. Academic Freedom, a sister volume to the Guide, dealt with the intellectual and administrative liberty that university teachers must have if their work is to be academically viable and socially valuable. Already in , Academic Freedom offered a sharp attack on the Thatcherite use of league tables and performance indicators, and on high civil servants, vice-chancellors, and government ministers who rely on the numbers. In effect, accountants and managers and long lists of numbers had overtaken much that universities did. Academic Freedom ended with a straightforward prescription: university teachers and (on occasion) responsible administrators should make the hard academic decisions to which they are called—not civil servants, not numbercrunchers, not politicians. This view did not mean elected politicians were released from the burden of honest choice and decision, particularly in regions of governance and public life for which they had direct responsibility and care. But Russell’s point remained: it would be madness if statistical tables replaced responsible and able human beings, or if those human beings accepted that they must become automatic “decision machines”. Conrad Russell died on  October , but must have had a form of prescience. For in , more than thirty academic units and fields were eliminated in United Kingdom universities on grounds of efficiency, ranking in league tables, and performance indication. Each time the administrator concerned threw up her hands, claiming she had no choice, as the league table or the last Research Assessment Exercise “made me do it”. Up the line, politicians have gone further, even rejoicing in the New Management of British higher education and the pleasant prospect of even greater “efficiencies” in the next decade. Conrad Russell well understood that freedom is not just academic. An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Liberalism relies, then, on recent political history to provide its main narrative thrust. By the mid-point of the book, one has the impression that current events have shaped his liberalism, and that his understanding of the history of liberalism is “presentist”. But Conrad Russell starts by saying that he doesn’t pretend to be writing history (or philosophy) in his Guide. To call Conrad Russell “presentist” is to underplay... (shrink)

Russell’s most important source for his book on Leibniz was C. I. Gerhardt’s seven-volume Die philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Russell heavily annotated his copy of this important edition of Leibniz’s works. The present paper records all Russell’s marginalia, with the exception of passages marked merely by vertical lines in the margin, and provides explanatory commentary.

At the turn of the century Bertrand Russell advocated an absolutist theory of space and time, and scornfully rejected Leibniz’s relational theory in his Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz. But by the time of the second edition, he had proposed highly influential relational theories of space and time that had much in common with Leibniz’s own views. Ironically, he never acknowledges this. In trying to get to the bottom of this enigma, I looked further at contemporary (...) texts by Russell, and also those he might have relied on, especially that of Robert Latta. I found that, like Latta’s, Russell’s interpretation of Leibniz was heavily conditioned by his immersion in neo-Hegelian and neo-Kantian philosophy prior to 1898, and that the doctrine of internal relations he attributes to Leibniz was more nearly the view of Lotze. (shrink)

Logicism and the Philosophy of Language brings together the core works by Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell on logic and language. In their separate efforts to clarify mathematics through the use of logic in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Frege and Russell both recognized the need for rigorous and systematic semantic analysis of language. It was their turn to this style of analysis that would establish the philosophy of language as an autonomous area of inquiry. (...) This anthology gathers together these foundational writings, and frames them with an extensive historical introduction. This is a collection for anyone interested in questions about truth, meaning, reference, and logic, and in the application of formal analysis to these concepts. (shrink)

These essays present new analyzes of the central figures of analytic philosophy -- Frege, Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, and Carnap -- from the beginnings of the analytic movement into the 1930s. The papers do not reflect a single perspective, but rather express divergent interpretations of this controversial intellectual milieu.

G. E. Moore attended Russell’s lectures on Leibniz in 1899 and kept detailed notes which have been preserved among his papers. The present article prints his notes in their entirety with annotations.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:88 Reviews EPISTEMOLOGY OFMODERNISM WILLIAM R. EVERDELL History/ St. Ann'sSchool Brooklyn, NY 11201, USA [email protected] Ann Banfield. The Phantom Table:Woolf,Fry,Russelland the Epistemology of Modernism. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge U.P., 2000. £35.00; US$49.95. In Virginia Woolf's difficult masterpiece, The Waves(1931),each of several separate interior monologues-"streams of consciousness" in the American critical idiom-is separated from the next by an interpolated "Interlude". The interior monologues are assigned co different characters, (...) bur the Interludes are rendered from no perspectiveat all, verymuch like the "Time Passes"chapter of Woolf's earlier and better known novel, Tothe Lighthouse (1927).The passive voice and the demonstrative and indefinite pronotms are essential, removing from the scene not only the characters' points of view, but the author's as well. Numbered among the consequences of the new twentieth-century technique of interior monologue, the Interludes can be accepted today as one more trick of literary "Modernism", but for Woolf it was new, and the task of preventing any of her Interludes from becoming just another report from the rypical "omniscient narrator" of Victorian fiction was one of the most demanding she ever set herself as a writer. Like her friend the Post-Impressionist critic Roger Fry, she wanted to analyze the world outside the self into its smallest sensible elements, then show human selvesasthey formed by accumulating the experience of these myriad, random, discontinuous components, and finally to recombine these components in their two kinds, selvesand sense-able things, into a meaningful whole-a work of art. Rejecting both the idealism of Bradley and the British philosophical generation of the 1890sand the naive positivist materialism coming out of the 1850s, Bertrand Russell eventually settled on an ontology most philosophers call "realist " in that it rejected the view that the world accessible to the senses was no more than a mental construct and considered it naive to assign the origin of subjectivity to matter. The material world was, Russell thought, actually external -"out there". He did think, however,that all we knew of the external world was what wassensed by the sensesand pictured by the mind. He alsoconcluded (in essayslike "The Relation of Sense-data to Physics"written in 1910-17)d1at both that world and what we knew of it was presented in very small parts, and Reviews 89 analyzable down to them, or, in other words, that both ontology and epistemology were atomized. Each mind, with its senses, occupied, he thought, one of an infinite number of occupied and unoccupied "perspectives", each of which Lmiquely focused che "sensibilia"-whatever was perceived in che external world-like a Leibnizian monad. Machemacicallogic, on which Russell set che highest store, would be able, he thought, to bring together perspectives by providing a minimal secof cruchswhich, though abscracc,were objective in che sense chaccheywere noc private and could be agreed to by all. Something similar though rougher mighc be done for chesensibilia in cheworld "ouc chere" by che science of physics. Did Virginia Woolflearn from Bertrand Russell?To a latcer-dayacademic ic sounds too urrerly improbable, for che simple reason (obvious to academics) chat anyone who has made icto the upper levelsof English literature must have chosen cheseparticular heights to scale because the trail was so blessedlyfreeof chosenasry mathematical burrs and logical reazles,and the air so filledwith che pure chatter of French phenomenologisrs, that no hiker would ever have to struggle with analytical philosophy again. Lessmetaphorically, the separation of departments of literature from those of philosophy has come so close to divorce chat few in U.S. English Departments can make head or cail of che graduate thesis that one of Russell's philosophy students wrote on F.H. Bradley, and fewer still can trace the term "objective correlative" used by thac student (who was in fact T. S. Eliot) back to an early work of Husserl. Meanwhile, ic is taken for granted by those in Philosophy that there are no ideas worth discussing in Woolf, or, indeed, in any other novelise,greacthough she may be, Lmlessone is to descend from ontology and epistemology to the foothills of ethics and politics, or worse, aesthetics. (Among... (shrink)

PROLOGUE Philosophers in pursuit of first principles often appear, even to fellow philosophers, to be off on a quixotic quest. Bertrand Russell, perhaps the ...

William Sweet gathers responses to the major writings of the leading figures of the British idealist movement, including contributions by Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, Sir Ernest Barker, Sir Henry Jones, R.F.A. Hoernle, J.S. MacKenzie, Brand Blanshard and others.

The article is devoted to the North American Sartre Society, which was founded in 1985. The author as its co-founder develops his point of view presenting during panel discussion of Sartre’s relations with the United States on the 2015 meeting. He devoted a lot of papers and books to Sartre’s philosophy. Some of them are presented in the references. The author reflects at a somewhat deeper level on Sartre’s attitudes towards USA in the context of its history and international relations, (...) saying about philosopher’s contradictions, the strategy and tactics of his self-disinvitation. The author traces Sartre’s transition from one myth of America to another in later life. Sartre’s initial experiential encounter with the American reality was by no means entirely positive, but he did like New York City, feeling a sense of freedom in the midst of its crowds that he retained as an important part of his picture of America when back in France. Freedom, an open future, almost unlimited possibilities, and a lack of a sense of history of the sort by which Europe is shackled. Several events of the postwar world history such as Korean war, then Vietnam war paved the way for Sartre’s most salient later attitudes towards America. Meanwhile, Sartre had accepted an invitation to present lectures at Cornell University in 1965. But after American massive bombing of North Vietnam in 1965 Sartre responded by disinviting himself from Cornell by way of protest. Recounting these events, the author of the paper recalls so-called “Cornell Lectures”, which were saved in unfinished manuscript form and have been given the title “Morale et Histoire”. A serious interest in American political life is shown on Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s visit to Cuba as guests of Fidel Castro and Sartre’s participation in Lord Bertrand Russell’s independent War Crimes Tribunal. (shrink)

In this paper I piece together a Wittegnsteinian view of the topics indicated in my title, contrasting it with the views of Bertrand Russell and Donald Davidson ‐ two philosophers who, in words from the Blue Book, seem “constantly to see the method of science before their eyes.” I conclude that Wittegnstein helps us understand something those philosphers tend to overlook: that “freedom of the will” gets its meaning not in a belief to be assessed by evidence but, (...) on the contrary, in the expression of a way of living and assessing life that limits the role of “assessing beliefs by evidence.”. (shrink)

Bertrand Russell said more than once that he was uncomfortable about a conflict, as he saw it, between two things: the strength of the conviction with which he held his ethical beliefs, and the philosophical opinions that he had about the status of those ethical beliefs—opinions which were non-cognitivist, and in some sense subjectivist. Russell felt that, in some way, if he did not think that his ethical beliefs were objective, he had no right to hold them (...) so passionately. This discomfort was not something that Ayer noted or discussed in his account of Russell's moral philosophy and ethical opinions, at least in the book that he wrote for the Modern Masters series . Perhaps this was because it was not a kind of discomfort that Ayer felt himself. His own philosophical views about the status of ethics were at all periods at any rate non-cognitivist, and I think that he did not mind them being called ‘subjectivist’. He did indeed argue that the supposed difference between objectivism and subjectivism in ethics did no work, and that philosophers who took themselves to be objectivists could not achieve anything more than those who admitted they were subjectivists. Ayer based this mainly on the idea that the claims made by objectivists for the factuality, objective truth, and so forth of moral judgments added nothing to those judgments—so far as moral conclusions were concerned, the objectivist was saying the same as the subjectivist but in a louder voice. (shrink)

(Accepted for an edition of Synthese that never saw light of day, and remained on my website. Written 2005.) Noting the status of the Law of Continuity as one of Leibniz’s most cherished axioms, Bertrand Russell charged that his philosophy nevertheless amounted to “a complete denial of the continuous”. Georg Cantor made a similar accusation of inconsistency about Leibniz’s philosophy of the actual infinite. But I argue that neither doctrine is inconsistent when the subtleties of Leibniz’s syncategorematic interpretation (...) are properly taken into account. Leibniz rejects the existence of infinite wholes: an infinite aggregate of actual things forms only a fictitious whole. Analogously, infinitesimals are only fictitious parts, this time of ideal wholes. That is, just as an actual infinity of terms can be understood syncategorematically as more terms than can be assigned a number, without there being any infinite numbers, so too the infinitely small can be given a syncategorematic interpretation by means of the Law of Continuity, without there existing any actual infinitesimals. By examining Leibniz’s justification of infinitesimals in his calculus, I argue that the syncategorematic interpretation is also applicable to series of changes, and thus exonerates Leibniz from Russell’s criticism: on this interpretation all naturally occurring transitions are continuous in that the difference between neighbouring states is smaller than any assignable. This means not that there exists a least difference, but that for any assignable finite difference, there exists a smaller one. Thus there is a true continuous transition, even though the states themselves and all assignable differences between them are actually discrete. (shrink)

During the last hundred years the notion of time flow has been held in low esteem by philosophers of science. Since the metaphor depends heavily on the analogy with motion, criticisms of time flow have either attacked the analogy as poorly founded, or else argued by analogy from a “static” conception of motion. Thus (1) Bertrand Russell argued that just as motion can be conceived as existence at successive places at successive times without commitment to a state of (...) motion at an instant, so duration can be conceived as existence at each of the times at which a thing exists without any commitment to a becoming or flow from one instant to another. I call this the “at-at” objection to time flow. A second objection (2) is that the sufficiency of the “B-theoretic” conception of time for physics makes the concept of time flow otiose. On this rendering the existence of a thing through time is just the “tenseless existence” of the thing at each instant of the duration (or at each spacetime point), without any flow from one instant or point to another. A third objection (3) is that in relativity theory, owing to the relativity of simultaneity, there is no unique invariant ‘now’, or hyperplane of simultaneously occurring events. If time flow is conceived in terms of the flow of such a ‘now’, then the non-existence of a worldwide instant of occurrence appears to be refuted. Lastly, (4) a capstone to these criticisms is the objection famously raised by Jack Smart: if rate of flow of any quantity can only be reckoned with respect to time, then with respect to what does time flow? If it does not even make sense to ask how fast time flows, then surely the metaphor should be abandoned as confused. (shrink)