Moisés Macías-Bustos

In his controversial book _An Outline of Philosophy_, first published in 1927, Bertrand Russell argues that humanity demands consideration solely as the instrument by which we acquire knowledge of the universe. From our inner-world to the outer-world, from our physical world to the universe, his argument separates modern scientific knowledge and our ‘seeming’ consciousness. These innovative perspectives on philosophy made a significant contribution to the discourse on the meaning, relevance and function of philosophy which continues to this day.

From 1914 on Russell's epistemology was dominated by the attempt to show how we come by our knowledge of the external world. As he gradually became aware of the inadequacies of the "pure empiricist" approach, Russell realized that his program was viable only insofar as certain postulates of inference were allowed. In this paper I trace the development of the structural postulates from Analysis of Matter to Human Knowledge. The basic continuity of Russell's thought is established. Certain confusions implicit in the various formulations of the postulates are brought to light. Finally, it is argued that the viability of Russell's program rests on a larger number of independent postulates than he thought were needed. Some implications of Russell's work for current work in the philosophy of science are briefly sketched.

This book, originally entitled Why Men Fight, is generally seen as the fullest expression of Russell's political philosophy. Russell argues that after the experience of the Great War the individualistic approach of traditional liberalism has reached its limits. Political theory must be based on the motivated forces of creativity and impulse rather than on competition. Both are best fostered in the family, in education, and in religion - each of which Russell proceeds to discuss. The ideas expressed in _Principles of Social Reconstruction_ have greatly contributed to Russell's fame as a social critic and anti-war activist. The new introduction by Richard Rempel locates them in the context of Russell's other writings and show that neither his ideas nor his language have lost their force and topicality over the years.

This book, originally entitled Why Men Fight, is generally seen as the fullest expression of Russell's political philosophy. Russell argues that after the experience of the Great War the individualistic approach of traditional liberalism has reached its limits. Political theory must be based on the motivated forces of creativity and impulse rather than on competition. Both are best fostered in the family, in education, and in religion - each of which Russell proceeds to discuss. The ideas expressed in _Principles of Social Reconstruction_ have greatly contributed to Russell's fame as a social critic and anti-war activist. The new introduction by Richard Rempel locates them in the context of Russell's other writings and show that neither his ideas nor his language have lost their force and topicality over the years.

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.

I characterize and argue against the standard interpretation of logical atomism. The argument against this reading is historical: the standard interpretation of logical atomism (1) fails to explain how the view is inspired by nineteenth-century developments in mathematics, (2) fails to explain how logic is central to logical atomism, and (3) fails to explain how logical atomism is a revolutionary and new "scientific philosophy." In short, the standard interpretation is a bad history of logical atomism. A novel interpretation of the view that repairs these difficulties is sketched in the concluding section.

My goal in reviewing Soames’ book was to help readers of this journal evaluate his contribution to the history of analytic philosophy, with a special focus on his discussion of Russell. Soames charges both that I misrepresent the contents of his book and that I make mistakes in the interpretation of various aspects of Russell’s philosophy. If I had committed errors of the former sort, I would certainly apologize and thank Soames for bringing such mistakes to my attention. After explaining why, I do not believe I have misrepresented the contents of his book, I will turn to the one substantive issue that he raises in his reply, namely the need for unperceived sense-data in Russell’s external world program. Nothing Soames says in his book or in his reply has led me to revise my original remarks.

This monograph reappraises the role of Bertrand Russell's philosophical works in establishing the analytical tradition in philosophy. It's main aims are to: * improve our understanding of the history of analytical philosophy * engage in the important disputes surrounding the interpretation of Russell's philosophy * make a contribution to central issues in current analytical philosophy. Drawing extensively from Russell's less well known and unpublished works, this book is a welcome addition to the literature and will undoubtedly find a place on the bookshelves of philosophers around the world.

In he Problems of Philosophy and other works of the same period, Russell claims that every proposition must contain at least one universal. Even fully general propositions of logic are claimed to contain “abstract logical universals”, and our knowledge of logical truths claimed to be a species of a priori knowledge of universals. However, these views are in considerable tension with Russell’s own philosophy of logic and mathematics as presented in Principia Mathematica. Universals generally are qualities and relations, but if, for example, PM’s disjunction (∨) is a relation, what is it a relation between? There is no obvious answer to this given Russell’s other philosophical commitments at this time, although hints are left in some of the pre-PM manuscripts. In this paper, I explore this tension in Russell's philosophy and relate it to developments both before and after Problems.

For Russell, Aristotelian syllogistic inference does not do justice to the subject of logic. This is surely not surprising. It may well be something of a surprise, however, to learn that in Russell’s view neither Boolean algebra nor modern quantification theory do justice to the subject. For Russell, logic is a synthetic a priori science studying all the kinds of structures there. This thesis about logic makes up the lion’s share of Russell’s philosophy of logic until the late 1920’s, and we shall have little to say of his flirtations with the naturalization of mind thereafter. We shall have much to say about his views on the ontology of structures, for they underwent extensive changes in the time from his writing The Principles of Mathematics (1903) to the three of the four projected volumes of Principia Mathematica (1910, 1912, 1913) coauthored with Alfred North Whitehead. The fourth volume on geometry never appeared. Much of this article’s presentation of Russell’s Logic will concern Russell’s various logical systems as they pertain to his Logicism. In “Mathematics and the Metaphysicians” (1901), Russell’s heralds his logicist thesis, observing that mathematics has enjoyed a conceptual revolution. One of the chief triumphs of modern mathematics, he explains, consists in having discovered that mathematics studies relational structure and is therefore free of commitment to the metaphysicians’ abstract particulars such as numbers and spatial figures. This revolutionary conception of mathematics was made possible by advances in geometry, especially in non-Euclidean geometry, and advances in analysis, where real numbers, limits and continuity were newly defined by thinkers such as Cantor, Dedekind, and Weierstrass. On the new conception or mathematics, it is relational order, not magnitude that is the focus. Meanwhile, Logic was also enjoying a conceptual revolution due to Gottlob Frege, who maintained that with the impredicative comprehension of functions, logic (that is, comprehension principle logic, ‘cp-Logic’ hereafter) is an informative science. Russell took this new science to be a study of relational structure, conducted by studying relations independently of whether they are exemplified. The branches of mathematics, in Russell’s view, are studies of different sorts of relations, which structure their fields. Mathematics, then, is a branch of the cp-Logic of relations.

Certain advocates of the so-called “neo-logicist” movement in the philosophy of mathematics identify themselves as “neo-Fregeans” (e.g., Hale and Wright), presenting an updated and revised version of Frege’s form of logicism. Russell’s form of logicism is scarcely discussed in this literature and, when it is, often dismissed as not really logicism at all (in light of its assumption of axioms of infinity, reducibility and so on). In this paper I have three aims: firstly, to identify more clearly the primary meta-ontological and methodological differences between Russell’s logicism and the more recent forms; secondly, to argue that Russell’s form of logicism offers more elegant and satisfactory solutions to a variety of problems that continue to plague the neo-logicist movement (the bad company objection, the embarrassment of richness objection, worries about a bloated ontology, etc.); thirdly, to argue that neo-Russellian forms of logicism remain viable positions for current philosophers of mathematics.

According to Quine, Charles Parsons, Mark Steiner, and others, Russell’s logicist project is important because, if successful, it would show that mathematical theorems possess desirable epistemic properties often attributed to logical theorems, such as aprioricity, necessity, and certainty. Unfortunately, Russell never attributed such importance to logicism, and such a thesis contradicts Russell’s explicitly stated views on the relationship between logic and mathematics. This raises the question: what did Russell understand to be the philosophical importance of logicism? Building on recent work by Andrew Irvine and Martin Godwyn, I argue that Russell thought a systematic reduction of mathematics increases the certainty of known mathematical theorems (even basic arithmetical facts) by showing mathematical knowledge to be coherently organized. The paper outlines Russell’s theory of coherence, and discusses its relevance to logicism and the certainty attributed to mathematics.

By 1918 Bertrand Russell had well-formed and distinctive opinions on many aspects of economic philosophy, theory and policy. In the second half of his life (1919–70) he wrote at great length on a very wide range of economic issues, including modern technology and the prospects for abolishing scarcity; population growth, eugenics and birth control; the economic development of China; the case for democratic socialism; the case against Soviet communism; the causes of economic crises; and the economic background to war and peace. Russell’s economic writings appeared as chapters of books on subjects as diverse as the philosophy of science, the history of nineteenth-century Europe, the principles of education and the case for world government. Economic themes can be detected even in his most frivolous newspaper articles. He was a great literary stylist, and his popular writings on economics were widely read and possibly quite influential, especially between the wars.

The title of this paper is in the past tense to indicate that the question it will address is whether the Axiom of Reducibility is a principle of logic according to the view of logic that Russell had when writing the first edition of Principia Mathematica.'It is often said that Logicism was a failure because when it avoided the Scylla of contradiction in Frege's system it fell into the Charybdis of requiring'obviously non-logical principles at Russell's hands. The axiom~non-logical principle which Russell had to add to his system in order to be able to develop mathematics. I want to consider this criticism of the axiom from several points of view.Why is it thought that the axiom of reducibility is not a principle of logic?What reasons does Russell actually give for doubting its logical status? Are they good reasons?