Our Knowledge of the External World as a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy · Bertrand Russell
PREFACE
The following lectures[1] are an attempt to show, by means of examples, the nature, capacity, and limitations of the logical-analytic method in philosophy. This method, of which the first complete example is to be found in the writings of Frege, has gradually, in the course of actual research, increasingly forced itself upon me as something perfectly definite, capable of embodiment in maxims, and adequate, in all branches of philosophy, to yield whatever objective scientific knowledge it is possible to obtain. Most of the methods hitherto practised have professed to lead to more ambitious results than any that logical analysis can claim to reach, but unfortunately these results have always been such as many competent philosophers considered inadmissible. Regarded merely as hypotheses and as aids to imagination, the great systems of the past serve a very useful purpose, and are abundantly worthy of study. But something different is required if philosophy is to become a science, and to aim at results independent of the tastes and temperament of the philosopher who advocates them. In what follows, I have endeavoured to show, however imperfectly, the way by which I believe that this _desideratum_ is to be found. [1] Delivered as Lowell Lectures in Boston, in March and April 1914.
The central problem by which I have sought to illustrate method is the problem of the relation between the crude data of sense and the space, time, and matter of mathematical physics. I have been made aware of the importance of this problem by my friend and collaborator Dr Whitehead, to whom are due almost all the differences between the views advocated here and those suggested in _The Problems of Philosophy_.[2] I owe to him the definition of points, the suggestion for the treatment of instants and "things," and the whole conception of the world of physics as a _construction_ rather than an _inference_. What is said on these topics here is, in fact, a rough preliminary account of the more precise results which he is giving in the fourth volume of our _Principia Mathematica_.[3] It will be seen that if his way of dealing with these topics is capable of being successfully carried through, a wholly new light is thrown on the time-honoured controversies of realists and idealists, and a method is obtained of solving all that is soluble in their problem. [2] London and New York, 1912 ("Home University Library"). [3] The first volume was published at Cambridge in 1910, the second in 1912, and the third in 1913.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.