Product Description

A survey such as this by one of the world's leading thinkers of his entire philosophical canon, is clearly as important as it is fascinating. It is a masterpiece of philosophical autobiography.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #997960 in Books
• Published on: 1995-10-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 220 pages

Customer Reviews

I felt an aching compassion for young men embarking in troop trains to be slaughtered
Bertrand Russell was an utmost clinical analyzer of the scriptures of his colleague-philosophers. With his penetrating mathematical insights he could easily translate their often dark and contorted formulations into plain comprehensible sentences and expose the real meaning and/or the inner contradictions of their highbrow wordings.

In this book, he exposes harshly the morass of linguistics and Wittgenstein's `Philosophical Investigations', demolishes William James, tells how he destroyed unintentionally Frege's life work and gives insightful comments on Tarski, Ryle and his own struggle with induction.

Astonishingly, the main influence on his life as a philosopher was not a philosophic problem, but World War I: `One effect of that war was to make it impossible for me to go on living in a world of abstraction.' It turned him away from pure mathematics.

Morass of linguistics
Bertrand Russell had no `sympathy with those who treat language as an autonomous province.' For him, `the essential thing about language is that it has meaning, that it is related to something non-linguistic.'
As Karl Popper said, linguistics is nothing more than cleaning one's spectacles.

Wittgenstein
Bertrand Russell was extremely harsh for Wittgenstein's second philosophical period (the `Philosophical Investigations'), where `we are now told that it is not the world that we are to try to understand but only sentences', nor the separation of `what may count as knowledge from what must be rejected as unfounded opinion.'
`The positive doctrines seem to me trivial and its negative doctrines unfounded.'

William James
B. Russell explains that for William James, `a belief is rendered true by the excellence of its effects'. More, William James `says that what he means is not that the consequences of the belief are good, but that the believer thinks they will be.'!

Ryle, Tarski
B. Russell doesn't agree with Ryle (`philosophy cannot be fruitful if divorced from empirical science'), but he agrees with Tarski `that truth consists in one sort of relation to facts, while falsehood consists in another sort of relation.'

In his characteristic sarcastic and vitriolic style, Bertrand Russell torpedoes in this book big chunks of modern `philosophy'. It is a must read for all those interested in philosophy and the way of the world.