Ektopos linked to an interesting discussion of Bertrand Russell that some might find interesting. The discussion is a book review of Ray Monk's Bertrand Russell: The Ghost of Madness 1921-1970. By coincidence I'd been reading earlier in the day Quine's discussion of the history of Russell's metaphysical development from basically a Hegelian to a near Platonist to an Empiricist not that far removed from Carnap (and who gave Carnap a lot of the foundation to engage in his project). Now I must confess, as I've mentioned before, a certain fondness for Russell. But I also found his papers, such as "On Denoting", somewhat problematic as well. I suppose I view Russell somewhat like I view speech act theory. Interesting, helpful, but ultimately unsatisfying.
The relevant quote from the review is probably this one.
Who knew then that this fertile mind and eloquent voice belonged to a man that was spouting simplistic solutions to complex problems which were beyond his grasp or, that a mere thirty years later, both his doctrines and his persona would be thoroughly repudiated. The great lesson of Ray Monk's Bertrand Russell: The Ghost of Madness, the second volume of his comprehensive Russell biography, is that one can be possessed of a brilliant mind, a fastidious commitment to logic and a love of rationality and still fall into tautology and speciousness; or, what is worse, become exploited by sycophants and adventurers into causing harm to those very principles one holds most dear.
I'd add that saying that Russell's "doctrines" would be repudiated is a tad strong. I think Russell, in both philosophy and mathematics, is still well thought of and many still make use of aspects of his philosophy.
Ouch. I agree that "repudiated" is a pretty harsh term. I'm in no place to judge at all, but I see him as the most important 20th century philosopher. Perhaps this has to do with the tendency that people have to take the idealization of language that was inevitably part and parcel of his analysis as a program rather than a discrete clarification. I've been going through my Russell books, and in between bouts of deep regret for the fact that many of them are mildewed (our house is over a century old, so the basement is a damp stone cellar), it's given me a chance to address the question you posed in our other discussion.
At any rate, and as an example, Sainsbury's book on Russell definitely takes the point of view that Russell's atomism was supposed to result in some thoroughgoing atomistic language or conception of reality where all the ultimate epistemically primitive atoms can be identified. This strikes me as the kind of thesis a college freshman could topple, but Sainsbury seems to have no problem attributing it to Russell.
If nothing else, Russell's theory of descriptions, which is more or less repudiated in some sense, represents a key step in understanding how to understand the ontological commitments that languages make. "On Denoting" is Russell's most difficult work (his famously cryptic Frege critique is as difficult as anything Kant wrote). After a decade, I need to re-read it, but I remember getting the feeling from it that Russell he was therein doing something there that hadn't been done before, though I must admit I'm at a loss to put my finger on it.
I think Quine's analysis of Russell is fairly interesting.
I think that Russell is probably is the place that figures like Leibniz, Descarts or Spinoza are in. No one really buys their views at all and everyone finds problems in their arguments, but they constantly are discussed even in the context of modern philosophical problems. Their influence is tremendous. (Well, perhaps less with Leibniz, who is I think often neglected outside of historic philosophy)
Quine always struck me as temperamentally sympathetic with Russell, but I don't remember him discussing much more than his theory of descriptions. If I'm not mistaken, he seeks to divorce it from it's metaphysical import (Again, from memory: Russell had at one point identified platonic universals with predicates [file under Russell's persistent Lockean tendencies]). I seem to remember Quine saying somewhere that type theory and ZF solve Russell's paradox the same way; specifically, they both require sets to be composed of members of already existing sets.
Speaking of Locke, Anthony Quinton has written some interesting stuff on the interplay of Russell's neutral monism how it relates to Lockean dualism, and how it figured into Russell's attempt to avoid a Carnapian/Quinean type of conceptual relativism. I remember this because late Russell is usually written off without much comment. But the last post I made at T&S on monism is based on this (quite loosely, I'm sure). (Gee, now that I think of it, I'm probably more familiar with the secondary Russell literature than I'd guessed.)
What exactly do you find interesting about Quine's analysis?
Oops, that last one was me again.
I've closed comments in order to avoid spam since I don't check this older blog as much anymore.
and Theology
Number of unique visitors:
Blogged by Clark Goble