The logic of a radical philosopher; Podium

Taken from an address by the Southampton University professor of philosophy to the Forum for European Philosophy 1999

ONE OF the most arresting passages in Bertrand Russell's corpus of writing is the opening paragraph of the preface to his 1948 book, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits. There, in identifying the public to whom the book is addressed, Russell appears to repudiate the value of his own earlier contributions to philosophy: "The following pages are addressed not only or primarily to professional philosophers, but to that much larger public which is interested in philosophical questions without being willing or able to devote more than a limited amount of time to considering them."

He goes on: "Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley and Hume wrote for a public of this sort, and I think it is unfortunate that philosophy has come to be regarded as almost as technical as mathematics. Logic... is technical in the same way as mathematics is, but logic... is not part of philosophy. Philosophy proper deals with matters of interest to the general educated public, and loses much of its value if only a few professionals can understand what is said."

Readers of Russell's earlier work might justifiably have been bewildered. Can the fervent advocate of Scientific Method in Philosophy really be lamenting the technical turn that philosophy has taken?

Though Russell's reputation for changing his philosophical views every few years is justified, the attitudes expressed in this passage are consistent with views he had expressed since his rejection of neo-Hegelian Idealism in the 1890s.

For Russell, the epitome of technical, professional, university philosophy was not the analytic tradition that he helped to found, but the Kantian and Hegelian Idealism espoused by the Cambridge philosophers of his youth. One finds throughout his work and correspondence a liberal sprinkling of abuse directed at such philosophers, not only for their Idealism but also for their donnish narrowness.

As Russell saw it, where academic philosophy was conservative, his work was radical; where academic philosophy appealed to authority, his work appealed only to reason; and where academic philosophy was critical, and uninspired, his work was constructive, ambitious and, in a certain way, ecstatic. His description of Aristotle in History of Western Philosophy as lacking any trace of Bacchic enthusiasm was meant to contrast with his discussion earlier in the book of the essence of philosophy as lying in the exaltation of a certain kind of intellectual ecstasy. In Russell's mind, this conception of philosophy was exemplified by Pythagoras:

"For Pythagoras, the `passionate sympathetic contemplation' was intellectual, and issued in mathematical knowledge. In this way, through Pythagoreanism, `theory' gradually acquired its modern meaning; but for all who were inspired by Pythagoras, it retained an element of ecstatic revelation... To those who have experienced the intoxicating delight of sudden understanding that mathematics gives to those who love it, the Pythagorean view will seem completely natural, if untrue."

For Russell, then, mathematics provided a liberation from the deadness he despised in academia. Mathematics was his first love and was always associated with passion and a disdain for authority.

Russell accepts that logic is technical, but insists that logic is not part of philosophy, thus holding on to his claim that philosophy is essentially non-technical. Philosophically, the crucial difference between the Russell of Human Knowledge and the Russell who declared philosophy to be indistinguishable from logic is that the former had been persuaded by Wittgenstein that logic had no subject matter of its own, that there were no such things as logical facts, and that therefore the study of logic could not be the means to the discovery of eternal truths. And if philosophy was the search for certain knowledge, it followed that logic and philosophy were distinguishable.

The abandonment of his earlier hopes for logic was disillusioning, but its corollary - that philosophy was essentially a non-technical discipline - was in some ways extremely welcome to him, not only for the opportunities it gave to pour scorn on the academic philosophy he had always hated. Many years before his conversion to a Wittgensteinian, "linguistic" view of logic, Russell had yearned to write philosophy in a non-technical way so as to reach an audience outside academic life. "I should like to write things of human interest, like bad philosophers, only without being bad," he wrote to a friend soon after finishing Principia Mathematica. "But perhaps", he added, "it is the badness that is interesting."