Bertrand Russell's Philosophy

The journey of Bertrand Russell's life stems in part from the journey of his philosophical life. Russell was one who developed philosophic overtures that ebbed and flowed from his intellectual understanding of the universe. To be sure, in his writings there is a change in emphasis from an early idealistic or Monistic understanding of the universe to a realistic, neutral monistic one. Finally, with various intricacies in between, it could be argued that Russell finished his days holding to logical positivism which was founded upon his materialistic understanding of the universe. Most known for his analytic philosophy, Russell maintained that knowledge is true when philosophical propositions are based on logical constructions largely derived from principles of statistics and theorems, of which sense experience plays a subsidiary role.

Central to his philosophy, throughout the development in his understanding, was the place of the logic behind mathematics. In his works The Principles of Mathematics and Principia Mathematica Russell thought it advantageous to demonstrate that if mathematical postulates rest on logic, certainty can be grasped. If a certain mathematical principle could not be related to or stem from statistics and theorems, certainty could not be proven, which formed the basis of his philosophy. This contradicted his earliest idealist claim that reality is inseparable from and dependent upon the mind and that all reality is mental and One, and embraced a more moderate approach. Adopting realism, Russell stated that objects of experience are independent of experience of them and depend upon the logical proposition and knowledge a priori. Deviating from this view, Russell ultimately geared away from the validity of a priori knowledge, stating that the material world is all that exists. As one comes to knowledge a posteriori (or from experience and perception), one can make inferences based on logic to causes and effects. In other words, true inferences can be made from sense perception if indeed the experiences can be validated through logical meaning. Otherwise, one would be hard pressed to make a truth claim.

At the same time, truth claims for Russell had limits. He saw that at its best, the scientific examination of things break reality down to components and parts that can be grasped, but nevertheless, our experience can fail us. Thus, valid truth propositions in the ultimate sense are derived from the perceptions and experience of the individual based on logical constructions of scientific observational and experiential data but is still probabilistic and not certain.

[1]A.C. Grayling., Russell (Oxford University Press: New York, NY), 60-61.