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

Chapter 9 "The Problems of Philosophy": The World of Universals

In this chapter, the nature of universals and what objects are part of them is analyzed. Russell takes up Platonic ideas, arguing that his is one of the most correct theories. He gives the example of Justice and Whiteness, which we cannot find so in reality, but we can find many things that participate in the idea of Justice and Whiteness, eternal and immutable ideas.

- Adjectives, nouns, prepositions, and verbs: indicate universals.

- Adjectives and nouns express qualities, while verbs and prepositions express relations.

- The word will be applicable to a number of particular things because they all participate in a common nature or essence. This pure essence is what Plato calls an "idea" or "form." (It must not be supposed that "ideas," in his sense, exist in minds, although they may be perceived by minds.) The "idea" justice is not identical with something that is right: it is

something other than the particular things, of which the particular things are participants.-Not being particular, it cannot exist itself in the world of sense. Moreover, it is not fleeting or changeable like the things of sense: it is eternally itself, immutable and indestructible. Thus Plato is led to a supersensible world, more real than the common world of sense, the unchanging world of ideas, which alone gives the world of sense whatever pale reflection of reality may belong to it. The truly real world, for Plato, is the world of ideas; for whatever one may try to say of the things of the sense-world, one can only succeed in saying that they participate in such and such ideas, which, therefore, constitute their whole character.-Berkeley and Hume argue that when we speak of "whiteness" we can only do so if in relation to a particular white thing. And this is true, says Russell, of geometry when we have to apply it to individual figures. But the difficulty emerges when we askhow we know that a thing is white or is a triangle. We do this by the universal of resemblance. And this cannot be denied, although qualities can. If we want to avoid the universals whiteness and triangularity, we will choose some particular patch of white or some particular triangle, and say that anything is white or a triangle if it has the right kind of resemblance to the chosen particular. But then the required resemblance will have to be universal. -It remains to be shown that universals are not mental (in the sense that they are not exclusively in our minds). They are independent of our being thought of and of our knowing them (e.g. Edinburgh is north of London, it would be true even if there was not a single mind in the universe capable of understanding it). They are also neither in space nor time, but they are still something. The ambiguity of the word "idea" generates the misunderstanding of their nature: when I think of "whiteness" it is not the whiteness that isin my mind, but the act of thinking it. If it were only mental, two people could not think it, nor could the same person at two different times. What thinking about whiteness has in common with other thoughts is the object (i.e. the universal). Therefore they are the object of thought. In this sense they do not exist, but subsist or are, where "to be" is different from "to exist" because outside of time. The world of universals is therefore the world of being. -It will be seen that no sentence can be composed without at least one word denoting a universal. The nearest approach would be a statement of the kind "I like this." But even here the word "I like" denotes a universal, because I may like other things, and other people may like other things. -So all truth simply universals... ----------------- Knowledge by description: I will say that an object is "known by description" when we know that it is "so-and-so", without knowing who or

What the so-and-so is. For example, I know that the candidate who gets the most votes will be elected, even though I don't know who the candidate who gets the most votes is. The problem I would like to consider is: What do we know in these cases, where the subject is simply described? That is, when we know that there is an object, and no more, that has a certain property. ["Knowledge by Knowledge and Knowledge by Description, 1911]. There is an object that answers to a definite description, even though we do not know any object: knowing that the so-and-so exists when we do not know any object that we know to be the so-and-so.

- The objects of which we are aware do not include physical objects (as opposed to sense data), nor the minds of others. These things are known to us by what I call "knowledge by description",

- In the case of knowledge by knowledge we know only the datum directly, not its properties, or the fact that it is so and so: we know yellow simply for what it

is and not the fact that yellow has certain properties, it is the colour that is lighter than black or lighter than white or that it is the colour of this pen. In the case of knowledge by description, on the other hand, we know only the datum that falls within the description, that satisfies a certain description. For example we cannot know Bismark by knowledge if we have never met him for chronological reasons, we know him by description: it is that object which satisfies certain conditions expressed in a description, for example the fact that Bismark was a minister, the description under which we know Bismark. This is also true of universals, which can be known by descriptions: -Relation between knowledge by knowledge and knowledge by description: Many universals, like many particulars, are known to us only by description. But [...] the knowledge of what is known by description is in the last analysis reducible to the knowledge of what is known by knowledge.

knowledge by description, 1911]. We know Bismark by description and the description is "the primeminister of Prussia", this description is the reference for other things, there are other components: primeminister, Prussia. If we were not aware of Prussia we only know it by description, the description itself again "make reference" to other new things, like the concept of state. In the end when the analysis is complete we can only get to the description if we refer to entities of which we have direct knowledge.

The fundamental epistemological principle in the analysis of propositions containing descriptions is this: every proposition we can understand must be composed of constituents with which we are acquainted.

The main reason for supposing the principle to be true is that it seems almost impossible to believe that we can make a judgment or entertain a supposition without knowing what we are judging or supposing. We must attach some meaning to the words we use if we

are to speak meaningfully and not just make noise; and the meaning we. Knowledge by knowledge is the basis of our knowledge.attach to our words must be something we knowConnection between knowledge-by-knowledge and knowledge-by-description distinction and the theory ofdescriptions defined because descriptions play an important role here.

A judgment is a relation of a mind to several entities, i.e., the constituent entities of what is being judged:If, for example, I judge that A loves B, the constituents are I and A and love and B and judgment. Judging, isa many-term relation.

Now it is necessary to examine the view that judgments are composed of something called "ideas," and thatit is Julius Cresar's "idea" that is a constituent of my judgment. But in this view ideas become a veil betweenus and external things. In order to discover what I actually have in mind when I judge of Julius Cresar, onemust substitute for the proper name a description consisting of

some of the things I know about him. On the contrary, I hold that knowledge is entirely a relation. When, therefore, I say that we must substitute for "Julius Cresar" some description of Julius Cresar, in order to discover the meaning of a judgment nominally about him, I do not say that we must substitute an idea: our judgment is reduced entirely to the constituents we know. It is common to distinguish two aspects, meaning and denotation, in such phrases as "the author of Waverley." The meaning will be some complex, consisting (at least) of authorship and Waverley with some relation; the denotation will be Scott. Denotation, I think, is not a constituent of the proposition, except in the case of proper names, i.e., words which do not assign a property to an object, but only and solely name it: we must not understand denotation to mean the mere relation of a name to the thing named. The first point to observe is that, in any proposition about "the author of Waverley",

provided Scott is not explicitly mentioned, the denotation itself, i.e. Scott, does not occur, but only the concept of d notation, which will be represented by a variable. The real object (if it exists) which is the denotation is not (unless it is explicitly mentioned) a constituent of the propositions in which the descriptions recur; and this is the reason why, in order to understand such propositions, we need to know the constituents of the description, but we do not need to know its denotation. -Objects of knowledge by knowledge: proper names stand for an object and not for the description of the object. Russell often changed his mind about what objects we can know: In his early examples we know Bismarck if we know him personally; in this sense, Bismarck's wife knew Bismarck, while we do not. ""Bismarck"" would thus be a logically correct proper name for Bismarck's wife, but a definite description in disguise for us: what we know is only certain sense data that we link.

To Bismarck's body, data known by description. But a known description in order to be applicable to a particular must imply some reference to a particular we know: if Bismark is "the first chancellor of the German empire" we must know the word "German" or know a testimony or reading that states this about Bismark.

Here there is a distinction between proper names and definite descriptions. Frege calls both categories proper names, while Russell's defined descriptions work in another way than the logical proper name: "Bismark" is a proper name from a logical point of view for people who know him directly; while those who know him by description, the grammatical proper name is not a logical proper name but is a defined description, e.g. "Prime Minister of Prussia".

Later then Russell decided that only Bismarck can really know Bismarck, since he knows himself (his own self) (apart from his own self and universals, people can only know sensory data).

"Bismarck" sarebbe correttamente un nome proprio solo per Bismarck stesso. La moglie di Bismarck può essere direttamente consapevole dei dati sensoriali su Bismarck, come il colore del suo viso, può toccare Bismarck, ma non si può dire che