Posts Tagged Bertrand Russell
Russell’s Atomistic Metaphysics
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in PEL's Notes on June 10, 2011
Some information about Russell’s atomism was discussed in in our Wittgenstein’s Tractatus podcast.
For a bit more information, here’s his essay “The Ultimate Constituents of Matter,” pointed out to us (dismissively) by frequent blog discussion contributor Burl and mentioned on our recent episode.
I leave it to you all to explore this essay as you like, but let me give you a taste, which aligns well with what what we’ve seen previously of Russell, i.e. that perception grasps (by definition, it seems) something non-mental, that he believes in sense data, and (stressed more in our Wittgenstein discussion) he gives those sense data a primary place in the ontology:
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Russell’s Epistemology: “The Problems of Philosophy”
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in PEL's Notes on June 8, 2011
I wanted to follow up on a reference I made on the episode for folks who want to know more about Russell’s epistemology:
His book The Problems of Philosophy
One element of his epistemology which will sound familiar to fans of British empiricists is his distinction between knowledge by description and knowledge by acquaintance (from chapter 5):
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Bertrand Russell’s Very Short Introduction to His Ontology
Posted by Daniel Horne in Things to Watch on June 1, 2011
For those who can’t get enough Bertrand Russell, here’s an introduction to logical analysis from his History of Western Philosophy.
Georg Cantor and Ever Larger Infinities
Posted by Daniel Horne in Things to Watch on May 26, 2011
A big name-drop during the middle of the Russell episode was the sad story of Georg Cantor and his insanity-inducing continuum hypothesis. Anyone unaware of Cantor and his contributions might want to look at this clip from the Dangerous Knowledge BBC documentary. I thought it provided a good visual explanation of higher levels of infinity. But perhaps they horribly oversimplified it for the sake of television — mathematicians, share your thoughts!
If you like the clip, you can find the whole episode out on the wild web.
-Daniel Horne
Episode 38: Bertrand Russell on Math and Logic
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on May 25, 2011
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:30:30 — 82.9MB)
Discussing Russell’s Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1919), ch. 1-3 and 13-18.
How do mathematical concepts like number relate to the real world? Russell wants to derive math from logic, and identifies a number as a set of similar sets of objects, e.g. “3″ just IS the set of all trios. Hilarity then ensues.
This book is a shortened and much easier to read version of Russell and Whitehead’s much more famous Principia Mathematica, and given that we can’t exactly walk through the specific steps of lots of proofs on a purely audio podcast (nor would we want to put you through that), we spend some of the discussion comparing analytic (with its tendency to over-logicize) and continental (with its tendency towards obscurity) philosophy.
Featuring guest podcaster and number guy Josh Pelton, filling in for Seth.
Read with us online or buy the book.
End song: “Words and Numbers,” by Madison Lint (read more about this tune).
Russell on Locke’s Political Philosophy
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Web Detritus on May 17, 2011
On our not-yet-released Russell episode, Wes dismisses Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy
In any case, some nice gentleman has posted a recording of this part of that book being read aloud, which you can listen to here. There’s some subtle snarkiness in it that I find entertaining.
(There are six parts to the lecture, but you can follow the youtube links to get to the subsequent parts.)
Topic for #38: Russell on Math and Logic
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in General Announcements on April 14, 2011
What is a number? Is it some Platonic entity floating outside of space and time that we somehow come into communion with? We’ll be following up our foray into analytical philosophy with Frege with some Bertrand Russell: specifically his Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1919), which is the much shortened, non-technical version of his famous Principia Mathematica
We’ll focus on chapters 1-3, where he recounts Frege’s derivation of the concept of number (he says these pick out sets of things in the actual world: the number 3 is identical to the set of all trios, for instance, where “trios” are defined without explicit use of the number 3 or any other number), and then chapters 13-18, where he deals with some potential problems with this definition (e.g. ch. 13 asks what happens if there are a finite number of things in the world: then some high number would end up equaling the empty set), giving a crash course in symbolic logic (in ch. 14 and 15), giving a quick account of his theory of descriptions (as discussed in our Frege and Wittgenstein episodes) reducing (in ch. 17) the notion of a class or set itself to more fundamental logical notions (i.e. propositional functions), and (in ch. 18) giving a summary account on the relation between mathematics and logic (i.e. that there’s no line to be drawn between the two).
Read along with us online (the page includes a variety of different pdfs for tablet/phone reading) or buy the book.
A.J. Ayer and Bryan Magee on Frege and Russell
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Things to Watch on March 24, 2011
Bryan Magee and A.J. Ayer, a famous philosopher in his own right, here give an overview of Frege’s project and Bertrand Russell’s reaction to it.
Watch on Youtube.
The whole first clip here is just an overview of Frege, with his sense and reference distinction coming in around minute 8. In part two, Ayer and Magee talk up Michael Dummett just like I did on the podcast, and then close to minute 4, the conversation shifts to Russell and stays there through most of the rest of the series of clips.
Logicomix!
Posted by Daniel Horne in Reviewage on March 23, 2011
In the recent Frege episode, Mark related the famous anecdote of how Bertrand Russell, the man who “discovered” Frege, later confounded him by pointing out a paradox apparent within his logical system. As Wes recounted, Russell’s own attempt to ground mathematics in logic was also later frustrated by a young Kurt Gödel, whose early incompleteness theorems crippled the central purpose of Principia Mathematica.
Anyway, those of us who suffer nausea upon seeing the character ∀ can nevertheless relive those heady days with Logicomix. A comic book about the quest for absolute logical certainty makes an unlikely choice for an award-winning New York Times bestseller, but I must say its an entertaining read. To steal a brief recap from the NYT book review:
The story spans the decades from the late 19th century to World War II, a period when the nature of mathematical truth was being furiously debated. The stellar cast, headed up by Bertrand Russell, includes the greatest philosophers, logicians and mathematicians of the era, along with sundry wives and mistresses, plus a couple of homicidal maniacs, an apocryphal barber and Adolf Hitler.
Spoiler alert, per Seth: “Founding anything always fails.”
-Daniel Horne
Episode 34: Frege on the Logic of Language
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on March 13, 2011
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:47:51 — 98.8MB)
Discussing Gottlob Frege’s “Sense and Reference,” “Concept and Object” (both from 1892) and “The Thought” (1918).
What is it about sentences that make them true or false? Frege, the father of analytic philosophy who invented modern symbolic logic, attempted to codify language in a way that would make this obvious, which would ground mathematics and science. Applying his symbolic system to natural language forced him to invent strange entities like “thoughts” and “senses” that are neither physical nor psychological, and we pretty much spend this episode kvetching about the metaphysical implications of this and the fact that Frege didn’t care about them.
Featuring guest podcaster Matt Teichman, who also hosts Elucidations.
Read along: “The Thought,” “On Sense and Reference,” “On Concept and Object,” and we also read
Frege’s introduction (p. 12-25) to his book The Basic Laws of Arithmetic: Exposition of the System (1904), or just buy this book.
End song: “The Great Forgotten Lover,” from the 2011 New People album, Impossible Things.
Episode 7: Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: What Is There and Can We Talk About It?
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on August 19, 2009
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:27:08 — 79.8MB)
Discussing the beginning (through around 3.1) of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Mr. W. wrote that the world is made up of facts (as opposed to things) and that these facts can be analyzed into atomic facts, but then refused to give even one example to help us understand what the hell he’s talking about, and so Wes and Mark argue about it per usual while Seth corrects our German pronunciation. The first 3/4 of this episode was recorded off-site from our regular equipment, making the audio quality relatively sucky. Enjoy!
Read the text online or buy the book.
For a clearer explanation of fact-based ontology, see this short introduction by Bertrand Russell to his lectures on logical atomism.
End song: “Facts for a Moment (What You Are to Me),” recorded in 1992 and released on the Mark Linsenmayer album Spanish Armada, Songs of Love and Related Neuroses.
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The Partially Examined Life is a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living but then thought better of it. Each episode, we pick a text and chat about it with some balance between insight and flippancy. You don't have to know any philosophy, or even to have read the text we're talking about to (mostly) follow and (hopefully) enjoy the discussion. Discuss episodes and provide feedback here or via our Facebook group. You can also e-mail comments to mark@marklint.com or wesalwan@gmail.com.
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