Solitary Pain: Bertrand Russell as Cognitive Therapist

What kinds of things are events? Battles, explosions, accidents, crashes, rock concerts would be typical examples of events and these would be reinforced in the way we speak about the world. Events or actions function linguistically as verbs and adverbs. Philosophers following Aristotle have claimed that events are dependent on substances such as physical objects and persons. But with the advances of modern physics, some philosophers and physicists have argued that events are the basic entities of reality and what we perceive as physical bodies are just very long events spread out in space-time. In other words, everything turns out to be events. This view, no doubt, radically revises our ordinary common sense view of reality, but as our event theorists argue common sense is out of touch with advancing science. In The Event Universe: The Revisionary Metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead, Leemon McHenry argues that Whitehead's metaphysics provides a more adequate basis for achieving a unification of physical theory than a traditional substance metaphysics. He investigates the influence of Maxwell's electromagnetic field, Einstein's theory of relativity and quantum mechanics on the development of the ontology of events and compares Whitehead’s theory to his contemporaries, C. D. Broad and Bertrand Russell, as well as another key proponent of this theory, W. V. Quine. In this manner, McHenry defends the naturalized and speculative approach to metaphysics as opposed to analytical and linguistic methods that arose in the 20th century.

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Language and Meaning in the Age of Modernism

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474425032.001.0001 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

James McElvenny

Keyword(s):

Philosophy Of Language ◽

Vienna Circle ◽

Bertrand Russell ◽

Historical Study ◽

Personal Connection ◽

International Language ◽

Academic Philosophy ◽

Significant Figures ◽

Basic English ◽

And Linguistics

This book is a historical study of influential currents in the philosophy of language and linguistics of the first half of the twentieth century, explored from the perspective of the English scholar C. K. Ogden (1889–1957). Although no ‘Great Man’ in his own right, Ogden had a personal connection, reflected in his work, to several of the most significant figures of the age. The background to the ideas espoused in Ogden’s book The Meaning of Meaning, co-authored with I.A. Richards (1893–1979), is examined in detail, along with the application of these ideas in his international language project Basic English. A richly interlaced network of connections is revealed between early analytic philosophy, semiotics and linguistics, all inevitably shaped by the contemporary cultural and political environment. In particular, significant interaction is shown between Ogden’s ideas, the varying versions of ‘logical atomism’ of Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) and Ludwig Wittgensten (1889–1951), Victoria Lady Welby’s (1837–1912) ‘significs’, and the philosophy and political activism of Otto Neurath (1882–1945) and Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) of the Vienna Circle. Amid these interactions emerges a previously little known mutual exchange between the academic philosophy and linguistics of the period and the practically oriented efforts of the international language movement.

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Onward Christian Soldiers

10.1093/oso/9780190867577.003.0005 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Michael Ruse

Keyword(s):

First World War ◽

The Other ◽

Bertrand Russell ◽

World War ◽

Moral Purpose ◽

The First World War ◽

Fellowship Of Reconciliation ◽

Christian Leaders ◽

First World ◽

Religious War

In 1914, Europe went to war, because of German expansionism, but without a central moral purpose as in 1939. Christian leaders had to scramble to find justification, which they soon located in our sinful nature, and most particularly the sinful nature of the opponents. In major respects, therefore, the First World War was a religious war, battling against the infidel. Anglican leaders, like the Bishop of London, Arthur F. Winnington Ingram, urged the necessity of killing Germans; and Lutheran leaders on the other side, like Adolf von Harnack, were no less bloodthirsty. There was an often-despised pacifist minority. In England, this included the philosopher Bertrand Russell, who was very much not a Christian, and members of the “Fellowship of Reconciliation,” who very much were Christians. In America, the Episcopalian bishop of Utah, Paul Jones, got the sack because of his pacifism, and the Catholic Ben Salmon was sent to jail and refused communion by his church.

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The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell. Bertrand Russell , Paul Arthur Schilpp

Ethics ◽

10.1086/290480 ◽

1945 ◽

Vol 56 (1) ◽

pp. 75-77

Author(s):

Everett W. Hall

Keyword(s):

Bertrand Russell

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Frege and Wittgenstein: The Limits of the Analytic Style

Elements ◽

10.6017/eurj.v6i1.9022 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 6 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Christopher Sheridan

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Logical Analysis ◽

Linguistic Meaning ◽

Bertrand Russell ◽

Gottlob Frege ◽

Symbolic Logic ◽

Scientific Language ◽

German Mathematician ◽

Broad Application ◽

Analytic Tradition

The analytic tradition in philosophy stems from the work of German mathematician and logician Gottlob Frege. Bertrand Russell brough Frege's program to render language-particularly scientific language-in formal logical terms to the forefront of philosophy in the early twentieth century. The quest to clarify language and parse out genuine philosophical problems remains a cornerstone of analytic philosophy, but investigative programs involving the broad application of formal symbolic logic to language have largely been abandoned due to the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein's later work. This article identifies the key philosophical moves that must be performed successfully in order for Frege's "conceptual notation" and other similar systems to adequately capture syntax and semantics. These moves ultimately fail as a result of the nature of linguistic meaning. The shift away from formal logical analysis of language and the emergence of the current analytic style becomes clearer when this failure is examined critically.

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Marriage and Morals. Bertrand Russell

The International Journal of Ethics ◽

10.1086/intejethi.40.3.2377785 ◽

1930 ◽

Vol 40 (3) ◽

pp. 435-436

Author(s):

C. Delisle Burns

Keyword(s):

Bertrand Russell

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On Russell’s 1927 Book The Analysis of Matter

Philosophies ◽

10.3390/philosophies6020040 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 6 (2) ◽

pp. 40

Author(s):

Said Mikki

Keyword(s):

General Relativity ◽

Quantum Mechanics ◽

Building Blocks ◽

Bertrand Russell ◽

Important Work ◽

Philosophy Of Nature ◽

Foundations Of Physics ◽

The World ◽

Ordinal Space ◽

Historical Fact

The goal of this article is to bring into wider attention the often neglected important work by Bertrand Russell on the philosophy of nature and the foundations of physics, published in the year 1927. It is suggested that the idea of what could be named Russell space, introduced in Part III of that book, may be viewed as more fundamental than many other types of spaces since the highly abstract nature of the topological ordinal space proposed by Russell there would incorporate into its very fabric the emergent nature of spacetime by deploying event assemblages, but not spacetime or particles, as the fundamental building blocks of the world. We also point out the curious historical fact that the book The Analysis of Matter can be chronologically considered the earliest book-length generic attempt to reflect on the relation between quantum mechanics, just emerging by that time, and general relativity.

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Closed Structure

Journal of Philosophical Logic ◽

10.1007/s10992-021-09598-5 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Peter Fritz ◽

Harvey Lederman ◽

Gabriel Uzquiano

Keyword(s):

Formal Language ◽

Syntactic Structure ◽

Natural Extension ◽

Propositional Attitudes ◽

Higher Order ◽

Order Logic ◽

Bertrand Russell ◽

Structured Propositions ◽

Higher Order Logic ◽

Closed Structure

AbstractAccording to the structured theory of propositions, if two sentences express the same proposition, then they have the same syntactic structure, with corresponding syntactic constituents expressing the same entities. A number of philosophers have recently focused attention on a powerful argument against this theory, based on a result by Bertrand Russell, which shows that the theory of structured propositions is inconsistent in higher order-logic. This paper explores a response to this argument, which involves restricting the scope of the claim that propositions are structured, so that it does not hold for all propositions whatsoever, but only for those which are expressible using closed sentences of a given formal language. We call this restricted principle Closed Structure, and show that it is consistent in classical higher-order logic. As a schematic principle, the strength of Closed Structure is dependent on the chosen language. For its consistency to be philosophically significant, it also needs to be consistent in every extension of the language which the theorist of structured propositions is apt to accept. But, we go on to show, Closed Structure is in fact inconsistent in a very natural extension of the standard language of higher-order logic, which adds resources for plural talk of propositions. We conclude that this particular strategy of restricting the scope of the claim that propositions are structured is not a compelling response to the argument based on Russell’s result, though we note that for some applications, for instance to propositional attitudes, a restricted thesis in the vicinity may hold some promise.

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