Briefly: Russell's The Problems of Philosophy

By David Mills Daniel

Part of the "SCM Briefly" series, which summarizes books by philosophers and theologians, this book provides a summary of the problem of philosophy. It includes line by line analysis, short quotes, and a glossary of terms to help students with definitions of philosophical terms.

• Language: English
• Publisher: SCM Press
• Release date: Jan 25, 2013
• ISBN: 9780334048466

Book preview

Briefly:

Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy

The SCM Briefly series

Anselm’s Proslogion (with the Replies of Gaunilo and Anselm)

Aquinas’ Summa Theologica 1 (God, Part I)

Aquinas’ Summa Theologica 2 (God, Part II)

Aristotle’s The Nicomachean Ethics

Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic

Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy

Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

Kant’s Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason

Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling

Mill’s On Liberty

Mill’s Utilitarianism

Moore’s Principia Ethica

Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil

Plato’s The Republic

Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy

Sartre’s Existentialism and Humanism

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, SCM Press.

© David Mills Daniel and Megan Daniel 2007

The Authors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Authors of this Work

The authors and publisher acknowledge material reproduced from Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy, reissued second edition, with Introduction by John Skorupski, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001, ISBN 0192854232. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.

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978 0 334 04118 4

First published in 2007 by SCM Press

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Contents

Introduction

Context

Who was Bertrand Russell?

What is The Problems of Philosophy?

Some Issues to Consider

Suggestions for Further Reading

Detailed Summary of Bertrand Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy

Preface

1 Appearance and Reality

2 The Existence of Matter

3 The Nature of Matter

4 Idealism

5 Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description

6 On Induction

7 On Our Knowledge of General Principles

8 How A Priori Knowledge is Possible

9 The World of Universals

10 On Our Knowledge of Universals

11 On Intuitive Knowledge

12 Truth and Falsehood

13 Knowledge, Error and Probable Opinion

14 The Limits of Philosophical Knowledge

15 The Value of Philosophy

Overview

Glossary

Introduction

The SCM Briefly series, edited by David Mills Daniel, is designed to enable students and general readers to acquire knowledge and understanding of key texts in philosophy, philosophy of religion, theology and ethics. While the series will be especially helpful to those following university and A-level courses in philosophy, ethics and religious studies, it will in fact be of interest to anyone looking for a short guide to the ideas of a particular philosopher or theologian.

Each book in the series takes a piece of work by one philosopher and provides a summary of the original text, which adheres closely to it, and contains direct quotations from it, thus enabling the reader to follow each development in the philosopher’s argument(s). Throughout the summary, there are page references to the original philosophical writing, so that the reader has ready access to the primary text. In the Introduction to each book, you will find details of the edition of the philosophical work referred to.

In Briefly: Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy, we refer to Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (reissued second edition, with Introduction by John Skorupski), Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001, ISBN 0192854232.

Each Briefly begins with an Introduction, followed by a chapter on the Context in which the work was written. Who was this writer? Why was this book written? With Some Issues to Consider, and some Suggestions for Further Reading, this Briefly aims to get anyone started in their philosophical investigation. The Detailed Summary of the philosophical work is followed by a concise chapter-by-chapter Overview and an extensive Glossary of terms.

Bold type is used in the Detailed Summary and Overview sections to indicate the first occurrence of words and phrases that appear in the Glossary. The Glossary also contains terms used elsewhere in this Briefly guide and other terms that readers may encounter in their study of Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy.

Context

Who was Bertrand Russell?

Bertrand Arthur William Russell, a great-grandson of the sixth Duke of Bedford and grandson of the first Earl Russell (Lord John Russell), the Whig (later Liberal) politician and prime minister, was born in 1872. Both Russell’s parents had died by the time he was four, and he and his brother were brought up by his paternal grandparents. After reading mathematics and moral sciences (philosophy) at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became friendly with the philosophers G. E. Moore and J. M. E. McTaggart, Russell was elected a prize fellow of Trinity in 1895. His interest in the philosophy of mathematics led him to focus on logic, which, in collaboration with his supervisor, A. N. Whitehead, he decided to refashion. The outcome was Principia Mathematica, published in three volumes between 1910 and 1913.

From an early stage, Russell’s interests extended beyond academic philosophy. In 1907, he stood for parliament as a candidate for the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. He did not think that World War One was justified, and campaigned for peace and against conscription. As a result, he was dismissed from his lectureship at Trinity (to which he had been appointed in 1910) and was imprisoned for six months. Between the wars, Russell visited Russia, China and the United States, and ran a progressive school in Sussex. He also lectured, contributed articles to newspapers and, in addition to those on philosophy, wrote books on subjects that included science, education, politics and marriage. In the late 1930s, Russell went to the United States to take up visiting professorships at the universities of Chicago and California. However, in 1940, a campaign against him, on the grounds of his agnosticism and the allegation that his books promoted sexual immorality, prevented his appointment as a professor at City College, New York. In 1944, following election to a fellowship at Trinity, Russell returned to Cambridge, where he lectured for the next few years.

After World War Two, Russell became increasingly concerned about the possibility of another world war, and devoted much of his time to political activity. As a leading member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, he campaigned vigorously against nuclear weapons, and the sale of his archives to McMaster University in Canada enabled him to establish the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation in 1963. In 1967, he set up an International War Crimes Tribunal (of which Jean-Paul Sartre was a member) to investigate war crimes in Vietnam.

As a philosopher, Russell was in the tradition of great British empiricist philosophers, which includes John Locke, David Hume and Russell’s lay godfather, John Stuart Mill, and, like his friend, G. E. Moore, he reacted strongly against absolute idealism, which was the dominant philosophical doctrine at the end of the nineteenth century. Through Principia Mathematica, he made an unequalled contribution to the development of modern logic, and he was a major influence on other outstanding twentieth-century philosophers, such as Moore, Ludwig Wittgenstein and A. J. Ayer. In addition to Principia Mathematica and The Problems of Philosophy, Russell’s books include The Principles of Mathematics (1903), Our Knowledge of the External World (1914), Mysticism and Logic (1917), Why I am not a Christian (1927), An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (1940), History of Western Philosophy (1945) and Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (1948). Following his brother’s death, he became the third Earl Russell in 1931. Russell received the Order of Merit in 1949, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949. He died in 1970.

What is The Problems of Philosophy?

Russell completed this introduction to philosophy in 1911, not long after publication of the first volume of Principia Mathematica. Given the arduous nature of the detailed work he had had to do for that celebrated work, he decided to turn his attention to more general questions of epistemology: what we know; how we know what we know; the limits of human knowledge; the relationship between truth and reality: whether we see things as they actually are in themselves, or only in some ‘mediated’ sense; and so on. Thus, the issues he addresses in The Problems of Philosophy are no less philosophically important, or controversial, than those covered in Principia Mathematica. The book does not cover every philosophical problem: for example, there is nothing about the question of determinism and free will and very little about ethics. Russell deals with those issues in which he was most interested at the time, and to which he felt he could make a ‘positive and constructive’ contribution.

He starts (Chapter 1) by asking an apparently simple question: is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it? Most people would think that there are many things we can claim to know with absolute certainty, not least all the material objects we encounter daily. However, it quickly becomes clear that it is not so straightforward. Russell uses the example of a table. We assume that the table we see in our kitchen is the same as the one we put food on when we have dinner, and that anyone who came into our kitchen would see, and experience, the same table as we do. But what do we actually know about the table? Its appearance changes, depending upon the position of the observer, lighting conditions, and so on. We think that it is the same colour all over, but the parts reflecting the light look much brighter than others. If we move, the apparent distribution of colours on the table changes; and so on. He concludes that no two people will see exactly the same distribution of colours, because they will not see the table from exactly the same point of view. The same applies to the table’s shape and texture. We may begin to question whether the way that objects, such as the table, appear to us is how they actually are in themselves; it becomes clear that, if there is a real table, it is not the same as what we immediately experience through sight or touch. The ‘real’ table is not immediately known to us, but is an inference from what is immediately known.

So, what do we immediately know? Russell calls that which is given by the senses (colours, sounds, and so on) ‘sense-data’; from these, we form certain beliefs about external objects. Our awareness of such sense-data, he calls ‘sensation’. Thus, we do not directly experience physical objects or matter, such as the table, but they are not completely unknown to us either. Rather, despite the variation in our sensations, the occurrence of sense-data is a sign that something exists independently of us, which is the cause of the sense-data we experience. Thus, we have mediated knowledge of the table/matter.

Clearly (Chapter 2), the issue of whether or not there are external objects with an intrinsic nature (matter), which exist when not being seen, is a crucial one, for, unless there are independently existing objects, there is no guarantee that other people’s bodies or minds exist independently of us, which could mean that the outer world is a dream, and we alone exist. This cannot be demonstrated to be wrong, so there is no logical absurdity in believing it. Russell suggests that we start with what we can be certain of: our immediate experiences. We may doubt the table’s physical existence, but not the sense-data that lead us to think there is one. Are there grounds for thinking that these do indicate the existence of physical objects? While there is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that life is a dream, in which we create all the things we come across, we have no reason for accepting this view, which is more complicated than the common-sense one that external objects are the source of our sensations. Every principle of simplicity indicates that there are objects, other than ourselves and our sense-data, which do