Riassunto esame Inglese accademico, Prof. Bonino Guido, libro consigliato Appunti in inglese di Storia della Filosofia I - inglese accademico, Bertrand Russell

History of philosophy I: Russell

Subject of the course

The subject of the course is the philosophy of Bertrand Russell up to the 1919 turn inspired by William James. Particular attention will be paid to the development of Russell's views and their relationship to the views of other philosophers. Russell's role in the emergence of analytic philosophy will also be addressed.

Biographical background

Russell was born in 1876 and died in 1961. A long life and a long philosophical life. He was a friend of John Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey, part of The Bloomsbury Group or Bloomsbury Set, or just "Bloomsbury," as its adherents called it. This was a group of artists and students developed in England's Bloomsbury district from about 1905 to World War II.

Works

• 1897: Essay on the foundations of geometry
• 1899: A critical exposition of the philosophy of Leibniz
• 1902: "Sur la logique des relations avec des applications à la théorie des séries"
• 1903: The Principles of Mathematics
• 1904: "Meinong's Theory of Complexes and Assumptions."
• 1905: "On Denotation"
• 1906: "The Paradoxes of Logic"
• 1907: "On the Nature of Truth"
• 1908: "Mathematical Logic Based on Type Theory."
• 1910-1913: Principia Mathematica (I vol. 1910, II vol. 1912, III vol. 1913; second ed. 1925-27)
• 1910: Philosophical Essays [collection]
• 1910: "Some Explanations in Reply to Mr. Bradley."
• 1910: "La théorie des type logiques"
• 1911: "Knowledge by knowledge and knowledge by description"
• 1912: The Problems of Philosophy
• 1912: "On the relation between universals and particulars".
• 1913: Theory of Knowledge [published posthumously]
• 1913: "The Nature of Sensory Data."
• 1914: Our knowledge of the external world as a field of scientific method in Philosophy
• 1914: "On the Nature of Knowledge"
• 1914: "The Relations of Sensory Data to Physics".
• 1918: Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays [collection]
• 1918-1919: "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism"
• 1919: Introduction to the Philosophy of Mathematics
• 1919: "On proposals: what they are and how they mean"
• 1921: The Analysis of the Mind
• 1922: Introduction to the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus of Ludwig Wittgenstein
• 1924: "Logical Atomism"
• 1927: The analysis of matter
• 1927: A Profile of Philosophy
• 1940: An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth
• 1948: Human knowledge: scope and limits
• 1956: Logic and Knowledge [collection]

Autobiographical writings

• 1944: "My Mental Development"
• 1959: My Philosophical Development
• 1967-1969: Autobiography

Collected Papers: The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell: a multi-volume collection of books not published in his lifetime.

A digression on British idealism

British idealism is an important component of our history, both because it is its historical background and because it is the personal background of Russell, who was initially an idealist.

• Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• James Frederick Ferrier
• Benjamin Jowett
• Thomas Carlyle
• James Hutchison Stirling
• Edward Caird

Characteristics of British idealism

British idealists, especially at an early stage, had a clear cultural agenda:

• Renew British philosophical culture in the latter part of the 1800s by importing German idealism (Kant, Fichte, Hegel).
• This renewal was intended to restore faith in traditional moral and religious values in a new non-dogmatic way like that of the Anglican church, against what they saw as the materialistic and skeptical tendencies characteristic of empiricism and associationism, utilitarianism.

Digression within digression: Relationships

Ontology and logic have long regarded relations with some reservation or unease. Relations were generally considered somewhat less "real" than properties (whereas in today's grammar, properties are thought to be a special category of relations). Reasons:

1. In Aristotle's theory of categories there are primarily entities belonging to the category of substance; entities belonging to the other categories (10 categories including: substance, quantity, quality-property, relations, etc.) exist only insofar as they are in some way associated with substances. Substances are the individual things: pen, dog, table. Existence can be said in many ways but substances have a different existence than other categories, they exist primarily, other entities that fall into other categories exist only secondarily. The color black is a quality: the dog is black, the dog is a substance. There is a quality associated with a substance, the color black exists only as (in the mode of being) the color of the substance dog, it depends on the substance to exist. The substance is independent, it doesn't need anything else to exist. Yet relations have a particularly low ontological status: according to Aristotle, relations are "the least real of categories". Probably because - among other things - they are less easily located (in space) than properties:
   • Dog is black: the dog is a substance that is here in space, it has a precise location. The property of the color black is located where the dog is, if the dog is on the table the color black is on the table. The properties are placed in space.
   • Relations are not: the pen is to the left of the pencil. The pen is here, the pencil there. But the relation between the two is where in space? In the middle? This is a difficult question. Philip is Alexander's father: Philip is in Pella, Alexander in Egypt, where is the relationship between the two? Somewhere between Pella and Egypt? This seems absurd, the question doesn't find a place in relationship space.
2. In addition to Aristotle's theory there is another reason why relations were considered less real than properties: Traditional (syllogistic) logic had difficulty in dealing systematically with inferences concerning propositions involving both quantification and relations between predicates at the same time. (∀x ∃y ∃x ∀y Example: everyone is loved by someone yLx or xLy). There is a predicative relation here because there is the predicate "loved by" and loving is a relation between someone who loves someone else, ∀x ∃y, ∀ and ∃ and there is also a "nested" quantification: are the two quantifiers. It can be interpreted in two ways:
   • For every xmarco there is a ylucia such that ylucia loves xmarco. Everyone is loved by someone but someone is always a different person, I am loved by x, you by y, he by f.
   • For every x there exists a y such that x loves y. This is a more unnatural interpretation.

The point is that we have two quantifiers in both interpretations, and the fact that you can have two different interpretations shows that the order in which the quantifiers are arranged is relevant. So the quantifiers are as it were nested inside each other and if we invert them this results in a difference. Syllogistic logic can only handle some inferences regarding these statements successfully. Attempts at a solution have been successful with only a few instances of inferences. Frege was the first to bring forward a solution to the problem that resembles our predicative calculus.

The problem could, however, be thought of in such a way as to eliminate relations from the balls: if I think that relations are the least real of the categories then this means that they are not important and we can neglect them. We note that if we have nested quantification but no predicative relation, nomadic predicate with properties, then we can turn statements that contain nested quantifications into statements that have none. Whereas if I put the predicative relation you can't do that. So if we drop predicative relations syllogistic logic can handle all kinds of inferences because we have excluded the most difficult ones. Reduce the same relations into something else, like properties.

Is it possible to transform relations into properties?

If I can define relations in terms of properties in such a way as to get rid of predicative relations, then there is no longer any problem for syllogistic logic because it can smoothly handle inferences involving statements without predicative relations. In syllogistic logic, many like Leibniz have tried to turn relations into properties.

Russell and idealism

For Russell, idealism has tried. For Russell this problem is important.

Locke and the empiricist tradition

The empiricist tradition interprets relations as produced by the mind and therefore as unreal, they are not really in the world but are produced by the mind thanks to our perceptions. "Assay on Human Understanding": relations "are not contained in the actual existence of things, but [are] something foreign and superinduced"; relations "have no other reality than that which they have in the minds of men": this does not mean that they have no reality but they have a different kind of reality;

Among the activities of the mind is that of "putting together two ideas (relation: there are ideas of things that put together create a relation, but there is no idea of relation, there are things), simple or complex, by putting them side by side in order to see both at the same time, without uniting them into one; this is how the mind obtains all its ideas of relations." There is a difference between property and relation, as in Aristotle.

Extreme associationism

Within empiricism lies a radical current, extreme Associationism: reducing relation to something that is not a relation. You have to replace the experience of some interrelated events with a series of experiences that are interrelated.

James Mill

The point is: the pen is to the left of the pencil, it seems that the relation "to the left of", is a part of the content of the experience: I have an experience of something and this experience is also formed by the relation "to the left of". But this is what Mill does not accept: the relation is not something real in the world that can be part of the experience, in the world I can experience only the pen and the pencil. Here there is not a single experience whose content contains a relation but we have a series of experiences, that of the pen and that of the pencil, and the relation is the product of how the two experiences are connected: the relation is extracted from the content of the experience and represents the connection of the experience.

Turn of the century

At the turn of the century, relationships came to the fore and became more "respectable." Some philosophers became interested in the logic of relations: one thinks of the logic of relations (Frege, Peirce, Schröder, Russell, etc.).

The fascination with relationships was not limited to logic but expanded into other fields: psychology by William James. For James, relationships were crucial, psychology did not consider relationships, contrary to associationist psychology, he emphasizes the experience of relationships: our experience is formed by units of pure experience and there are different types of this elemental experience, some of them are inherently relational. When you hear thunder there is a moment in which I hear the thunder, a moment in which I no longer hear the noise but there is also a moment in which I perceive that something has changed, a moment in between which is the experience of relationship.

Return to British idealism: Thomas Hill Green

A rather traditional type of British idealist. Many common themes of British idealism and its agenda are found in him. "Popular Philosophy in its Relation to Life", 1868 (here it is said that the British philosophical tradition is an unserious popular philosophy compared to idealism). Introduction to Hume's Treatise on Human Nature, 1874 (for Green, it is the most consistent form of British empiricism). Prolegomena to Ethics, 1883 (published posthumously, the most famous book, they are not a book on ethics but the main issues discussed in ethics: for a possible ethics one must accept a kind of metaphysics and epistemology); Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation, 1885 (he is an important political philosopher).

Green and relationships

All reality resides in relations; every object is constituted by the relations it has with other objects. Even at a simple level relations are fundamental: the pen is yellow, I attribute a property to an object, apparently there are no relations involved in this simple fact but in reality when I say it is yellow I say it is not implicitly red. To be yellow means not to be red and here there is a relation that connects yellow and red, colours that do not coexist in the object. When I say this pen, I am talking about a single object but also here I consider that this object is different from other objects, from the table for example: also here there is an implicit relation. If I say that it is different to others, this means that it is in relation with something else. Without relations, there would be no reality. (1) is argued by Green in all his works.

2. Only for a thinking consciousness do relations exist; relations exist only for the thinking mind. This is only assumed and not really argued by Green because this for common sense is an obvious assumption. Green criticizes empiricism: (2) is assumed by Green as it is also shared by his philosophical opponents i.e. empiricists so no further argument is needed.

(1) + (2) = idealism. All realities are produced by the mind or exist only in the mind.

3. There is an eternal consciousness, whose relational activity grounds all reality, and many finite consciousnesses (individual selves), which somehow participate in the eternal one. There is a sense in which reality depends not only on the individual mind of the individual but on an eternal consciousness, which could be God. (3) can be set aside for our purposes.

The error of the empiricists, for Green, is that they think it is possible to distinguish between what is given to us (i.e., sensory data) and what we (our thinking) add (i.e., relationships). The relations are added by our thinking. According to Green, nothing is given to us independently of the constitutive work of thought, which is another way of saying that all reality lies in relations.

Holistic character of Green's thought: you can't really distinguish the parts of realities because everything is connected to the whole.

Francis Herbert Bradley (1848-1924)

A not so typical idealist, idiosyncratic, some themes are atypical. Ethical Studies, 1874, The Principles of Logic, 1883, Appearance and Reality, 1893, Essays on Truth and Reality, 1914, Collected Essays, 1935.

Bradley's regress argument

Reconstruction of Bradley's regress argument (but it is not always easy to recognize it in Bradley's current formulations), it is divided into two parts:

Part A

No mere aggregate (enumeration, list, etc.) of constituents is equivalent to the complex (state of affairs, fact, etc.) somehow "composed" of such constituents; in other words, given a and F, the fact that Fa is thus not automatically given; what is missing is of course the "unity", or "connection" of the constituents themselves into a fact. Some entities are complex, made by other entities that are their constituents, as in the case of propositions: a list of constituents does not express the complex created by them. The pen (a) is yellow (F): there are two constituents, pen and yellow, an individual entity and a universal. But if we analyze the fact in its constituents, this does not express the unity of the complex.

(realism: Platonistic view and Aristotelian view. According to the first, universals exist independently of being exemplified by particulars, by individual objects. According to the second current, universals exist only if exemplified by particulars. The second option allows that there is both the pen and the yellow, and the existence of yellow which is a universal is assured by the fact that there are other things in the world which are yellow, other examples, even if this pen is not yellow. You can have the pen and the color yellow but that doesn't mean the pen is yellow. The connection to the facts is missing here, you need the pen and yellow to be connected together to give that the result).

Part B

Adding an additional constituent to the list that must be responsible for unity will not work, since what we get is just another (longer) list of constituents, for which exactly the same problem arises. If the constituent responsible for the connection of the other constituents in a fact is listed, this constituent is called "exemplification" and is about the relationship. Now there are 3 constituents: there is the pen, the yellow, and the exemplification of the relation which unites the two objects in a fact. But this doesn't solve the problem and it doesn't reveal the specific fact that the pen is yellow because here there are three constituents and not two but it's just another list that doesn't express unity. You can have the pen but this can be red, you have the color yellow because there are yellow things in the world and you have exemplification because in the world there are other facts such that some property is exemplified thanks to some individual entity, without however having the specific fact that the pen is yellow, without having the fact that the color yellow is exemplified by the pen.

If there were other constituents there would be the same problem: the pen, the yellow, the exemplification, the latter currently exemplifies the yellow with the pen so there is a further order of exemplification: the exemplification is exemplified by both elements: by the yellow and the pen, but the further analysis is: the pen, the yellow, the first order of exemplification, and also the two relations of second order of exemplification, we would have 5 constituents but again this would not solve the problem. It is called a regress argument because it is possible to have an infinite order of constituents but these do not solve the problem. "There is a relation C in which A and B are found and it appears to be united to both." [...] There would seem to be, then, another relation D in which C stands on one side and A and B on the other. But such an expedient immediately gives rise to a process at infinity. (1984, 159) It follows that "either the qualities remain entirely separate from their relations, and then we would have said nothing, or else we must establish a new relation" which however triggers an infinite regress.