BY BERTRAND RUSSELL, F.R.S LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD RUSKIN HOUSE, 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C. 1 First published in 1914 by The Open Court Publishing Company Reissued by George Allen & Unwin Ltd. 1922...

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 pos

Twenty years ago, the classical tradition, having vanquished the opposing tradition of the English empiricists, held almost unquestioned sway in all Anglo-Saxon universities. At the present day, though it is losing ground, many of the most prominent teachers still adhere to it. In academic France, in spite of M. Bergson, it is far stronger than all its opponents combined; and in Germany it has many vigorous advocates. Nevertheless, it represents on the whole a decaying force, and it has failed t

Evolutionism, in one form or another, is the prevailing creed of our time. It dominates our politics, our literature, and not least our philosophy. Nietzsche, pragmatism, Bergson, are phases in its philosophic development, and their popularity far beyond the circles of professional philosophers shows its consonance with the spirit of the age. It believes itself firmly based on science, a liberator of hopes, an inspirer of an invigorating faith in human power, a sure antidote to the ratiocinative

The topics we discussed in our first lecture , and the topics we shall discuss later, all reduce themselves, in so far as they are genuinely philosophical, to problems of logic. This is not due to any accident, but to the fact that every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and purification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word, logical. But as the word “logic” is never used in the same

Philosophy may be approached by many roads, but one of the oldest and most travelled is the road which leads through doubt as to the reality of the world of sense. In Indian mysticism, in Greek and modern monistic philosophy from Parmenides onward, in Berkeley, in modern physics, we find sensible appearance criticised and condemned for a bewildering variety of motives. The mystic condemns it on the ground of immediate knowledge of a more real and significant world behind the veil; Parmenides and

Among the objections to the reality of objects of sense, there is one which is derived from the apparent difference between matter as it appears in physics and things as they appear in sensation. Men of science, for the most part, are willing to condemn immediate data as “merely subjective,” while yet maintaining the truth of the physics inferred from those data. But such an attitude, though it may be capable of justification, obviously stands in need of it; and the only justification possible m

The theory of continuity, with which we shall be occupied in the present lecture, is, in most of its refinements and developments, a purely mathematical subject—very beautiful, very important, and very delightful, but not, strictly speaking, a part of philosophy. The logical basis of the theory alone belongs to philosophy, and alone will occupy us to-night. The way the problem of continuity enters into philosophy is, broadly speaking, the following: Space and time are treated by mathematicians a

It will be remembered that, when we enumerated the grounds upon which the reality of the sensible world has been questioned, one of those mentioned was the supposed impossibility of infinity and continuity. In view of our earlier discussion of physics, it would seem that no conclusive empirical evidence exists in favour of infinity or continuity in objects of sense or in matter. Nevertheless, the explanation which assumes infinity and continuity remains incomparably easier and more natural, from

The positive theory of infinity, and the general theory of number to which it has given rise, are among the triumphs of scientific method in philosophy, and are therefore specially suitable for illustrating the logical-analytic character of that method. The work in this subject has been done by mathematicians, and its results can be expressed in mathematical symbolism. Why, then, it may be said, should the subject be regarded as philosophy rather than as mathematics? This raises a difficult ques

The nature of philosophic analysis, as illustrated in our previous lectures, can now be stated in general terms. We start from a body of common knowledge, which constitutes our data. On examination, the data are found to be complex, rather vague, and largely interdependent logically. By analysis we reduce them to propositions which are as nearly as possible simple and precise, and we arrange them in deductive chains, in which a certain number of initial propositions form a logical guarantee for