Russell and the Materialist Principle of Logically Possible Worlds (original) (raw)
Related papers
RUSSELL ON MATTER AND OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE EXTERNAL WORLD
view that sensations are not caused by but rather constitute ordinary objects. Indeed, prima facie, his 1914 Our Knowledge of the External World reduces objects to sensedata. However, Russell did not think his view was phenomenalist, and he said that he never gave up either the causal theory of perception or a realist understanding of objects. 1
Russell's Logical Construction of the External World
The History of Skepticism
Soon after Russell’s ever popular Problems of Philosophy of 1912, Russell landed on the idea that the techniques of Principia Mathematica, where Russell and Whitehead “logically constructed” numbers out of sets, might be applied to the problem of our knowledge of the external world, where “commonsense” objects like tables and trees might be logically constructed out of sense-data. Russell then approaches the problem of our knowledge of the external world from an epistemologically driven account of sense-data and a metaphysical construction of commonsense objects from sense-data. Russell famously attempted this construction in his 1914 Our Knowledge of the External World and two journal articles from the same period, “On the Relationship of Sense-Data to Physics” and “The Ultimate Constituents of Matter.” This essay expounds and critically examines Russell’s attempt. Though the attempt arguably fails, it had a profound influence on later developments, especially Carnap’s Aufbau. Keywords Bertrand Russell, External World Skepticism, Foundationalism, Sense-Data, Logical Construction, Testimony, Other Minds
In Consciousness in the Physical World: Perspectives on Russellian Monism, (eds.) Torin Alter and Yujin Nagasawa, 2015
Bertrand Russell Mysticism and logic and other essays
Matter, the nature of, 125 ff; defi nition of, 164 ff Maxwell, 34 Meaning and denotation, 223 ff Meinong, 174, 220 , 225 Militarism, 50 Mill, 185, 193 ff Mysticism and logic, I ft *34
The Ontological Foundation of Russell’s Theory of Modality
Erkenntnis, 1990
Free download. Six recommendations and over 110 reads on ResearchGate as of January 16, 2025. Presented to the Bertrand Russell Society at the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division Meeting in December 1988. Published in 1990. This is my earliest publication on Russell on modality. Prominent thinkers such as Kripke and Rescher hold that Russell has no modal logic, and even that Russell was indisposed toward modal logic. In part 1, I show that Russell had a modal theory, which he repeatedly described and that Russell repeatedly endorsed Leibniz's multiplicity of possible worlds. In part 2, I describe Russell's theory as having three ontological levels. In part 3, I describe six Parmenidean theories of being Russell held, including: literal in 1903; universal in 1912; timeless in 1914; transcendental in 1918–1948. The transcendental theory underlies the primary level of Russell's modal logic. In part 3, I examine Rescher's view that Russell and his logic went against modality. Again, this paper was my pioneering work on Russell on modality. It remains fine on the topic mentioned in its title: the ontological foundation of Russell's theory of modality; at least, I have not changed my views in over 30 years. But the paper did not bring out that (1) while Russell's trio of explicit definitions of modal terms may be called his modal *theory*, it is not a *propositional modal logic*, (2) there are not just one, but *several* modal logics that are *implicit* in Russell, or at least he can be paraphased into those modal logics more reasonably than not, and (3) the trio of explicit definitions is implicitly their main logical building block. On those matters, this paper is overwhelmingly superseded by my later book, _Bertrand Russell on Modality and Logical Relevance_. All this is made especially clear in the 2015 second edition of that book, which has been updated with minor corrections through 2019, and which is the only edition I recommend that you read. The second edition is over twice as long as the 1999 first edition, so over half the material is new. The second edition also makes it abundantly clear that all the modal logics are *implicit*, or are at least more reasonable than not as formal paraphrases of various texts in Russell. That was my position in the first edition too, and I had stated it there more than once, but apparently not forcefully enough for some reviewers to notice. I hadn't thought I needed to. Doesn't everyone know Russell never explicitly states any modal logics? So I never imagined anyone would think *I* thought so. But since some reviewers of the first edition *did* think so (see e.g. my reply to Kervick), I hit readers over the head with it in the second edition. I even put the word "implicit" into some chapter titles. Of course, you cannot "reviewer-proof" a book.