Electric Agora (archive)

Tag: Bertrand Russell

  • A Pragmatic Option

    by Jay Jeffers ____ American Pragmatism has been controversial from the start. It was accused of “cosmic impiety” by Bertrand Russell, a founding father of Anglophone analytic philosophy. Rifts developed quickly even within the young school of thought, with the original pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce renaming his approach “pragmaticism,” which he thought was “ugly enough…

  • Wittgenstein and Woke Philosophy

    by Bharath Vallabha ___ Since I was a philosophy undergrad 25 years ago, I wanted academic philosophy to be more diverse. Back then, at least in the departments I was in, most philosophy professors and students were white males, and the curriculum was almost entirely European. What most bugged me was this was so taken…

  • Prolegomena for a Pluralist Metaphysics: Ontological Commitment

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ___ My working idea in these prolegomena is that (a) philosophers feel forced to embrace various “desperate” positions (Panpsychism, Dualism, Illusionism, etc.), because of a number of (often venerated) assumptions that they’ve taken on board, all of which happen to be wrong, and (b) the re-examination of those assumptions, within the…

  • More on Russell and Lawrence

    by Mark English In his autobiography, Bertrand Russell wrote of the “devastating effect” certain criticisms which D.H. Lawrence once made of his social and political views had on him. These events occurred in 1915. “I was inclined to believe that he had some insight denied to me,” Russell wrote, “and when he said that my…

  • Wittgenstein, Russell, and Lawrence

    by Mark English I recently wrote a piece in which I looked at the views of some 20th-century thinkers on language, metaphysics, science and philosophy. My main focus was on the logical empiricists and Ludwig Wittgenstein. In his youth, Wittgenstein worked with Bertrand Russell and then subsequently with the Vienna Circle before taking a rather…

  • Notes on Metaphysics, Language and Religion

    by Mark English Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein were diametrically opposed in their respective attitudes to science and religion. They had many other profound disagreements, but they were united in one respect at least. They both rejected the metaphysics of Idealism. Metaphysically speaking, Russell was mainly concerned to counter idealist notions and to defend a…

  • Self-Expression, Knowledge and Value

    by Mark English Attempts to express a comprehensive personal view of the world are doomed to failure. Each of us has a view of the world; some such views are more developed and plausible than others. But language (even supplemented with other modes of expression) is simply not equipped to articulate the complex and shifting…