Footnote Rn96

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I find myself in the absurd situation of having to apply footnotes to the footnote.
Use of the Control f function will help.

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Rn96. Russell's efforts to find a middle road between materialism and idealism began well before his temporary (?) lapse into monism.

In a paper [1] written before the Great War, Russell spoke about the relation of subject to object, which he called "acquaintance" versus the relation of object to subject, which he called "presentation." [2]

There is, to my mind, a danger that, in speaking of presentation, we may so emphasise the object as to lose sight of the subject. The result of this is either to lead to the view that there is no subject, whence we arrive at materialism; or to lead to the view that what is presented is part of the subject, whence we arrive at idealism, and should arrive at solipsism but for the most desperate contortions.

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1. "Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description" first appeared in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1910-1911, and was republished in Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays (Allen and Unwin 1918).

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2. That is, sRo means 's is acquainted with o' and oRs means 'o is presented to s' .

Footnote mh23

mh23. James's pragmatism eschewed hard-core determinism. But another major force opposed to the machine paradigm, the idealism of Hegel and Bradley, James rejected in favor of the element of randomness as an alternative something that breaks up the ironclad hand of fate.

Something "call it fate, chance, freedom, spontaneity, the devil, what you will" [1] was opposed by most philosophers, James said. Yet chance suited his conception of a pluralistic cosmos.

Curiously, James's ideas were partly confirmed by the successes of quantum physics in which it turned out that, contrary to Einstein, "God" indeed does play dice.

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1. The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy by William James (Longmans Green 1897).

Footnote jg13

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I find myself in the absurd situation of having to apply footnotes to the footnote.
Use of the Control f function will help.

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jg.13 Russell once made an interesting point that a system governed by efficient causes is not necessarily precluded from having a final cause [1].

As another illustration we may take the case of mechanism and teleology. A system may be defined as "mechanical" when it has a set of determinants that are purely material, such as the positions of certain pieces of matter at certain times. It is an open question whether the world of mind and matter, as we know it, is a mechanical system or not; let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that it is a mechanical system. This supposition—so I contend—throws no light whatever on the question whether the universe is or is not a "teleological" system. It is difficult to define accurately what is meant by a "teleological" system, but the argument is not much affected by the particular definition we adopt. Broadly, a teleological system is one in which purposes are realised, i.e. in which certain desires those—that are deeper or nobler or more fundamental or more universal or what not—are followed by their realisation. Now the fact—if it be a fact—that the universe is mechanical has no bearing whatever on the question whether it is teleological in the above sense. There might be a mechanical system in which all wishes were realised, and there might be one in which all wishes were thwarted. The question whether, or how far, our actual world is teleological, cannot, therefore, be settled by proving that it is mechanical, and the desire that it should be teleological is no ground for wishing it to be not mechanical.

A somewhat related point: In the Hegelian tradition, the individual is not an automaton. In fact, he is not really an individual. He is the product of the spirit of his age. Being part of a greater whole -- the World Spirit or World Mind -- he is subject to the evolution of this Mind, and so men of one age may be very different from those of another. Marx, while rejecting Hegelian theology, accepted the notion that History molds man. Marx's dialectical materialism was inspired by Hegel's philosophy and was a form of materialism that took a holistic view of human nature and physical dynamics. That is, Marx seemed to believe that the material world did not really work in a Newtonian sense. Neither was he particularly impressed with Darwinism. Marx's theory was picked up by Lenin, who rationalized his revolutionary credo on ground that "the people" could make a "new Soviet man." The state would wither away in a socialist utopia once the human mind had been reshaped so that it was no longer subjected to the illusions fostered by money, property and class.

I mention these points as they are significant sidelights on the issue of mechanism. But Ryle's book offers little or nothing about these matters.

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1. "On the Notion of Cause" was the presidential address to the Aristotelian Society, November 1912. It appeared in Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays by Bertrand Russell (Allen and Unwin 1918).

Note on Russell's 'quantum mechanical' insight (1915)

In 1915, Russell displays a quantum mechanical sort of thinking concerning matter.

The persistent particles of mathematical physics I regard as logical constructions, symbolic fictions enabling us to express compendiously very complicated assemblages of facts; and, on the other hand, I believe that the actual data in sensation, the immediate objects of sight or touch or hearing, are extra-mental, purely physical, and among the ultimate constituents of matter.

My meaning in regard to the impermanence of physical entities may perhaps be made clearer by the use of Bergson's favourite illustration of the cinematograph. When I first read Bergson's statement that the mathematician conceives the world after the analogy of a cinematograph, I had never seen a cinematograph, and my first visit to one was determined by the desire to verify Bergson's statement, which I found to be completely true, at least so far as I am concerned. When, in a picture palace, we see a man rolling down hill, or running away from the police, or falling into a river, or doing any of those other things to which men in such places are addicted, we know that there is not really only one man moving, but a succession of films, each with a different momentary man. The illusion of persistence arises only through the approach to continuity in the series of momentary men. Now what I wish to suggest is that in this respect the cinema is a better metaphysician than common sense, physics, or philosophy. The real man too, I believe, however the police may swear to his identity, is really a series of momentary men, each different one from the other, and bound together, not by a numerical identity, but by continuity and certain intrinsic causal laws. And what applies to men applies equally to tables and chairs, the sun, moon and stars. Each of these is to be regarded, not as one single persistent entity, but as a series of entities succeeding each other in time, each lasting for a very brief period, though probably not for a mere mathematical instant. In saying this I am only urging the same kind of division in time as we are accustomed to acknowledge in the case of space. A body which fills a cubic foot will be admitted to consist of many smaller bodies, each occupying only a very tiny volume; similarly a thing which persists for an hour is to be regarded as composed of many things of less duration. A true theory of matter requires a division of things into time-corpuscles as well as into space-corpuscles.

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An address delivered to the Philosophical Society of Manchester February 1915, reprinted from The Monist July 1915 and republished in Mysticism and Logic (Allen and Unwin 1918).

Footnote kr76

kr76. In 1914, Russell quoted with approval James on pluralism:

As regards our present question, namely, the question of the unity of the world, the right method, as I think, has been indicated by William James.[2] "Let us now turn our backs upon ineffable or unintelligible ways of accounting for the world's oneness, and inquire whether, instead of being a principle, the 'oneness' affirmed may not merely be a name like 'substance' descriptive of the fact that certain specific and verifiable connections are found among the parts of the experiential flux. . . . We can easily conceive of things that shall have no connection whatever with each other. We may assume them to inhabit different times and spaces, as the dreams of different persons do even now. They may be so unlike and incommensurable, and so inert towards one another, as never to jostle or interfere. Even now there may actually be whole universes so disparate from ours that we who know ours have no means of perceiving that they exist. We conceive their diversity, however; and by that fact the whole lot of them form what is known in logic as a 'universe of discourse.' To form a universe of discourse argues, as this example shows, no further kind of connexion. The importance attached by certain monistic writers to the fact that any chaos may become a universe by merely being named, is to me incomprehensible."

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In the first place a philosophical proposition must be general. It must not deal specially with things on the surface of the earth, or with the solar system, or with any other portion of space and time. It is this need of generality which has led to the belief that philosophy deals with the universe as a whole. I do not believe that this belief is justified, but I do believe that a philosophical proposition must be applicable to everything that exists or may exist. It might be supposed that this admission would be scarcely distinguishable from the view which I wish to reject. This, however, would be an error, and an important one. The traditional view would make the universe itself the subject of various predicates which could not be applied to any particular thing in the universe, and the ascription of such peculiar predicates to the universe would be the special business of philosophy. I maintain, on the contrary, that there are no propositions of which the "universe" is the subject; in other words, that there is no such thing as the "universe." What I do maintain is that there are general propositions which may be asserted of each individual thing, such as the propositions of logic. This does not involve that all the things there are form a whole which could be regarded as another thing and be made the subject of predicates. It involves only the assertion that there are properties which belong to each separate thing, not that there are properties belonging to the whole of things collectively. The philosophy which I wish to advocate may be called logical atomism or absolute pluralism, because, while maintaining that there are many things, it denies that there is a whole composed of those things. We shall see, therefore, that philosophical propositions, instead of being concerned with the whole of things collectively, are concerned with all things distributively; and not only must they be concerned with all things, but they must be concerned with such properties of all things as do not depend upon the accidental nature of the things that there happen to be, but are true of any possible world, independently of such facts as can only be discovered by our senses.

"On Scientific Method in Philosophy"
The Herbert Spencer Lecture, Oxford 1914,
recorded in Mysticism and Logic (Allen and Unwin 1918)

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2. Some problems of philosophy : a beginning of an introduction to philosophy by William James (Longmans, Green 1911).

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Russell agreed that a mere collection does not imply a unity and thought that the Copernican revolution had overthrown monism and anthrocentrism. But, Einstein's general theory of relativity was to soon cause Russell difficulties.

Some years before Russell, Johann Eduard Erdmann discussed the issue of monism among the early Greek thinkers:

According to Plato, the Eleatics, whose doctrine was perhaps older than Xenophanes, called that which we call the universe, the One. But since all their proofs of unity consist in polemics against Becoming, it is evident that the One is their name for unchanging Being, which also agrees with the assertion of Theophrastus, that they conceived Being as one. This name justifies the inference as to Pythagorean influences, even if the tradition that Xenophanes was instructed by the Pythagorean Telauges, should be false. It is a polemical contradiction of the Pythagorean doctrine, when Xenophanes asserts that the One does not breathe... The above Platonic testimony is completed by that of Aristotle, who says that Xenophanes, contemplating the whole universe, had said this One was God. Since Time contains multiplicity, the alone existent One, or the Deity, is eternal. Together with plurality, the indefiniteness (the apeiron) of the One is denied, and Aristotle's censure that it remained a moot point whether Xenophanes conceived his principle as peperasmenon, is undeserved. The spherical figure which Xenophanes is said to have ascribed to the Deity, is intelligible in one to whom the universe displays the Deity, and a consequence of the denial of every multiplicity of functions, and hence also ol organs. " A whole it sees, a whole it hears." Where all plurality is excluded there can be no question of Polytheism, nor, where no Becoming is assumed, of a Theogony : hence his scorn of the popular religion, his hatred of Homer, etc.

J.E. Erdmann
Williston S. Hough, translation editor
A History of Philosophy (Allen and Unwin; Macmillan 1890)
(Erdmann's first volume appeared in German in 1860)

 

Clearly, Russell and Xenophanes have a difference of opinion.

Footnote zs94

zs94. On this subject, Russell observes,

When we try to ascertain the motives which have led men to the investigation of philosophical questions, we find that, broadly speaking, they can be divided into two groups, often antagonistic, and leading to very divergent systems. These two groups of motives are, on the one hand, those derived from religion and ethics, and, on the other hand, those derived from science. Plato, Spinoza, and Hegel may be taken as typical of the philosophers whose interests are mainly religious and ethical, while Leibniz, Locke, and Hume may be taken as representatives of the scientific wing. In Aristotle, Descartes, Berkeley, and Kant we find both groups of motives strongly present.

Bertrand Russell
"On Scientific Method in Philosophy"
The Herbert Spencer Lecture, Oxford 1914,
recorded in Mysticism and Logic (Allen and Unwin 1918)

I would agree that Ryle was certainly prompted by a difficulty with religion, as he says in Concept. Yet his book shows very little interest in either. On the other hand, his lack of acquaintance with scientific matters is also evident. Yet the man Ryle sought to have done with, Descartes, gave us his dualism (about which I have serious reservations) because he saw that the mechanistic physics of his day appeared to clash with the theology of the soul. That is, as Russell notes, both the religious/ethical and scientific strains combine in Descartes.

The fact that neither strain is present in Ryle makes one wonder what strain he represents. How can one depose Cartesian dualism while scorning both science and religion?

I suppose one might in some sort of Wittgensteinian sense define the mind away, as did James and Watson before him, by regarding the mind as process only.

Much ado about nothing

[0.] 0 is defined as ∅, as is usual in several main set theories wrought as foundations of mathematics.

[1.] x ∈ R

[2.] x ∈ ∅ → x ∈ ∅

[3.] As the statements on the two sides of the arrow are both false, statement 2. is vacuously true.

[4.] So ∅ ⊆ ∅ holds by vacuous truth. It also holds by the axiom of identity.

[5.] (x ∈ R) · (x ∈ ∅) → x ∈ R

[6.] The statement on the left side of the arrow is false and the statement on the right side is true (by 1.). Since a falsehood implies anything, statement 5. is true.

[7.] Statement 5. can be restated R ∪ ∅ = R

[8.] Which is to say, R ∪ ∅ = R is vacuously true.

[9.] Or, ∅ ⊂ R is vacuously true.

[10.] With 0 defined as ∅, we arrive at the notion that the statement 0 ∈ R seems to contain a vacuous truth.

[11.] We find that ∅ is both a member and a subset of R. Its subset status holds vacuously. Whether its membership status is also vacuous depends upon how membership is determined. If we say { } ∈ N and { } ⊂ N, the second statement holds vacuously, but the first is asserted as a definition and so is not vacuous. So 0's subset status is vacuous but its membership in the reals is real enough.

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Comment: Here we have an interesting philosophical thought about the nature of 0. That is, it is questionable whether 0 really exists, though it is darned handy, and so it was necessary to find a way to make 0 subsist.

Footnote ne34

ne34. Bertrand Russell early on was highly critical of pragmatism and the evolutionary theory offshoot known as progressivism, which he took to be related to pragmatism.

The philosopher was concerned that if "all is process," then pragmatic truths are only temporary because evolution marches on. This then means that philosophy has no absolute (or eternal, I add) truths with which to contend. Russell also disliked the notion that progress was some obvious consequence of Darwinistic evolution, a theme scientists have been at pains to debunk since the time of the Nazi atrocities. (One might add that Lamarckian theory in the hands of the Stalinists also contributed to the 20th Century's record of genocide.)

John Dewey's form of pragmatism was inspired by Darwin's theory, as he says in his memoirs. I am not properly informed about Peirce, James and some of the others.

Writing in 1914, Russell takes issue with the naive, as he saw it, view of time taken by the evolutionist camp.

The kind of way in which, as it seems to me, time ought not to enter into our theoretic philosophical thought, may be illustrated by the philosophy which has become associated with the idea of evolution, and which is exemplified by Nietzsche, pragmatism, and Bergson. This philosophy, on the basis of the development which has led from the lowest forms of life up to man, sees in progress the fundamental law of the universe, and thus admits the difference between earlier and later into the very citadel of its contemplative outlook. With its past and future history of the world, conjectural as it is, I do not wish to quarrel. But I think that, in the intoxication of a quick success, much that is required for a true understanding of the universe has been forgotten. Something of Hellenism, something, too, of Oriental resignation, must be combined with its hurrying Western self-assertion before it can emerge from the ardour of youth into the mature wisdom of manhood. In spite of its appeals to science, the true scientific philosophy, I think, is something more arduous and more aloof, appealing to less mundane hopes, and requiring a severer discipline for its successful practice.

Darwin's Origin of Species persuaded the world that the difference between different species of animals and plants is not the fixed immutable difference that it appears to be. The doctrine of natural kinds, which had rendered classification easy and definite, which was enshrined in the Aristotelian tradition, and protected by its supposed necessity for orthodox dogma, was suddenly swept away for ever out of the biological world. The difference between man and the lower animals, which to our human conceit appears enormous, was shown to be a gradual achievement, involving intermediate being who could not with certainty be placed either within or with out the human family. The sun and the planets had already been shown by Laplace to be very probably derived from a primitive more or less undifferentiated nebula. Thus the old fixed landmarks became wavering and indistinct, and all sharp outlines were blurred. Things and species lost their boundaries, and none could say where they began or where they ended.

But if human conceit was staggered for a moment by its kinship with the ape, it soon found a way to reassert itself, and that way is the "philosophy" of evolution. a process which led from the amœba to Man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress—though whether the amœba would agree with this opinion is not known. Hence the cycle of changes which science had shown to be the probable history of the past was welcomed as revealing a law of development towards good in the universe—an evolution or unfolding of an idea slowly embodying itself in the actual. But such a view, though it might satisfy Spencer and those whom we may call Hegelian evolutionists, could not be accepted as adequate by the more whole-hearted votaries of change. An ideal to which the world continuously approaches is, to these minds, too dead and static to be inspiring. Not only the aspiration, but the ideal too, must change and develop with the course of evolution: there must be no fixed goal, but a continual fashioning of fresh needs by the impulse which is life and which alone gives unity to the process.

Life, in this philosophy, is a continuous stream, in which all divisions are artificial and unreal. Separate things, beginnings and endings, are mere convenient fictions: there is only smooth unbroken transition. The beliefs of to-day may count as true to-day, if they carry us along the stream; but to-morrow they will be false, and must be replaced by new beliefs to meet the new situation. All our thinking consists of convenient fictions, imaginary congealings of the stream: reality flows on in spite of all our fictions, and though it can be lived, it cannot be conceived in thought. Somehow, without explicit statement, the assurance is slipped in that the future, though we cannot foresee it, will be better than the past or the present: the reader is like the child which expects a sweet because it has been told to open its mouth and shut its eyes. Logic, mathematics, physics disappear in this philosophy, because they are too "static"; what is real is no impulse and movement towards a goal which, like the rainbow, recedes as we advance, and makes every place different when it reaches it from what it appeared to be at a distance.

I do not propose to enter upon a technical examination of this philosophy. I wish only to maintain that the motives and interests which inspire it are so exclusively practical, and the problems with which it deals are so special, that it can hardly be regarded as touching any of the questions that, to my mind, constitute genuine philosophy.

The predominant interest of evolutionism is in the question of human destiny, or at least of the destiny of Life. It is more interested in morality and happiness than in knowledge for its own sake. It must be admitted that the same may be said of many other philosophies, and that a desire for the kind of knowledge which philosophy can give is very rare. But if philosophy is to attain truth, it is necessary first and foremost that philosophers should acquire the disinterested intellectual curiosity which characterises the genuine man of science. Knowledge concerning the future—which is the kind of knowledge that must be sought if we are to know about human destiny—is possible within certain narrow limits. It is impossible to say how much the limits may be enlarged with the progress of science. But what is evident is that any proposition about the future belongs by its subject-matter to some particular science, and is to be ascertained, if at all, by the methods of that science. Philosophy is not a shortcut to the same kind of results as those of the other sciences: if it is to be a genuine study, it must have a province of its own, and aim at results which the other sciences can neither prove nor disprove.

Evolutionism, in basing itself upon the notion of progress, which is change from the worse to the better, allows the notion of time, as it seems to me, to become its tyrant rather than its servant, and thereby loses that impartiality of contemplation which is the source of all that is best in philosophic thought and feeling. Metaphysicians, as we saw, have frequently denied altogether the reality of time. I do not wish to do this; I wish only to preserve the mental outlook which inspired the denial, the attitude which, in thought, regards the past as having the same reality as the present and the same importance as the future. "In so far," says Spinoza,[6] "as the mind conceives a thing according to the dictate of reason, it will be equally affected whether the idea is that of a future, past, or present thing." It is this "conceiving according to the dictate of reason" that I find lacking in the philosophy which is based on evolution.

Bertrand Russell
The essay "Mysticism and Logic" appeared
in Hibbert's Journal (July 1914)
and was republished in
Mysticism and Logic (Allen and Unwin 1918)