The Philosophy of Logical Atomism (Open Court Classics) [Paperback]

Bertrand Arthur Russell (Author), David Pears (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0875484433 | ISBN-13: 978-0875484433 | Publication Date: March 19, 1985

Taken from a series of influential lectures delivered by Russell during the second decade of the twentieth century, this is a brilliant introduction to logical atomism and its application to ontology and epistemology.

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 196 pages
• Publisher: Open Court Publishing Company (March 19, 1985)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0875484433
• ISBN-13: 978-0875484433
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.3 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #138,547 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Russell's Antidote to the Monist Metaphysicians, February 1, 2006

By 

Stuart W. Mirsky "swm" (New York, USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Philosophy of Logical Atomism (Open Court Classics) (Paperback)

Bertrand Russell, one of the fathers of modern analytical philosophy, started out under the influence of the presiding English philosophical metaphysician of his day, the Hegelian F. H. Bradley. But he soon found himself in opposition to the kind of "monist" thinking Bradley exemplified. Russell made his major contributions to philosophy early on in the field of symbolic logic, which he all but revolutionized, and in the philosophy of mathematics, when he applied a logicist approach to establishing the fundamentals of mathematics in a joint effort with Alfred North Whitehead.

But Russell is not well remembered or studied today for this work though he lived a very long life thereafter and was much in the public eye as a peace activist, outspoken atheist (and some time agnostic) and all around spokesman for progressive ideas. What Russell is especially well known for in philosophical circles, however, is his role as teacher and mentor to the even more controversial and philosophically influential Viennese transplant, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Cambridge philosopher who supplanted him and whose work helped undermine the logical foundations Russell had built for mathematics.

Wittgenstein first sought Russell out when, as an engineering student in England, he became fascinated by Russell's work. After their initial meeting Wittgenstein became his student and, at least at the outset, Russell's designated successor. It was during his time with Russell that Wittgenstein developed ideas, under Russell's tutelage, which were to influence Russell himself and, as Russell notes repeatedly in this book, became the source for Russell's own new philosophy of logical atomism.

Premised on Russell's opposition to Hegelian monism (the idea that everything is only fully comprehensible when seen as part of a greater whole), logical atomism was Russell's attempt to develop a metaphysics which accounted for the common sense reality of our experience and was consistent with the empirical tradition in British philosophy which stretched back at least as far as David Hume. Russell credits Wittgenstein in this book with having generated the ideas that led him to formulate logical atomism, a philosophy that sought to account for the world in all its various aspects by relating it to the structure of the language in which we articulate information about it.

Russell's fundamental aim, as he says in the lectures in this book, was to develop an "ideal" language, based on pure logic, which did away with all the ambiguities of everyday language and enabled us to describe things with superior accuracy and effectiveness for scientific purposes. In so doing he posited, with Wittgenstein, that our language, when properly clarified, broke down into a series of components which mirrored the world. Thus we could come to know our world rightly only by developing, learning and using this clarified form of communication, this ideal language.

Russell drew on the developments he had pioneered in symbolic logic to offer a breakdown of reality in terms of his reformed language. Fundamental in his assumptions was the claim that proper names as we normally used them were explainable via a theory of descriptions (each name seen as a shorthand for a series of descriptive propositions) whereas true names could not be broken down at all.

True names, for Russell, would be nothing like names as we normally use the term. Indeed, he posited that names in this sense would be things like "this" and "that" as used only at the moment when a this or a that was within our actual observation. Really basic components of reality, he argued, were fleeting sensory experiences like patches of colors in our visual field and everything we knew in reality was built up of these more basic, albeit fleeting, elements.

Language, argued Russell, must be seen, in its purest form, to mirror this breakdown bit for bit or, better, atom of experience for atom of expression. In so doing, language could be broken down to its components in the same way as reality could be broken down. But, while reality could only be broken down in this way theoretically (i.e., we could never see the real components of our experience in isolation in any integrated and useful way), language, he argued, could in fact be deconstructed to reveal its atomic parts and that was the real job of philosophy.

Along the same vein, propositions in language, he suggested, stated facts, understood as states of affairs which consisted of combinations of experienced phenomena which somehow existed in the world in a manner that paralleled how they were combined in our language. He suggested there were atomic and molecular propositions (the latter being so-called simple propositions combined by logical conjunctions). In this, he was no doubt deeply influenced by the new physics then taking hold and dominating scientific thinking, a physics which saw the material world as consisting of atoms and molecules. Overall, in this book, which is the definitive compilation of Russell's logical atomism, he is at great pains to develop this new linguistic metaphysic which he thought would enable us to speak more accurately about the world, a world he held, that was pluralist and thus "atomic," not "monist" in its fundamental form.

The most obvious thing one comes away with from these readings is just how artificial and convoluted Russell's efforts to construct a suitably empiricist metaphysic in this way appear to be. The lectures consistently devolve into logical minutiae, false trails and digressions. Russell repeatedly backs away from his own claims, saying more work needs to be done here or that he is just not able to clearly state what he wants to say there. Russell's argument for logical atomism, as noted by D. F. Pears in his introduction, is premised on several confused notions and diverges from Wittgenstein's parallel rationalist approach as exemplified in his own Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus (written during this same period).

Unlike Wittgenstein, Russell takes an empiricist approach, hoping to build up his metaphysical picture from the ground of actual observations as he presents his listeners with the atomic facts of a piece of chalk immediately before their eyes and speaks of "simples" which may somehow be found in the world. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, employed a reasoning process according to Pears in order to claim that so-called logical atoms must be there, even if no one had as yet actually found them. In the end, Wittgenstein gave up the hope of finding genuine atomic facts and propositions in favor of a revised view which, contrary to Russell's approach, found clarity in attention to ordinary language and not in some idealized form built on an artificial logical framework. Russell, though he subsequently revised his views, and gradually ceased pushing logical atomism to any great extent, never went along with his former pupil's new insights which saw language as its own phenomenon and not merely a reflector of something else.

But even before Wittgenstein's new thinking took hold, the logical positivism of the thinkers of the Vienna Circle, already under Wittgenstein's influence, supplanted Russell's unsuccessful empiricist metaphysic with a new approach that denied metaphysics entirely in favor of testing for logical sense via a demand that propositions either be empirically or analytically verifiable. If they failed such a test, the logical postivists, more radical than Russell, excluded them from the realm of sense entirely. Wittgenstein thought they missed his point, too, as he moved in fits and starts into his later period and his notion that philosophy was really about the language in which our ideas were couched, not about the world or its underlying ontology at all.

Russell's lectures in this book are fascinating for those with an interest in early analytical philosophy but they are mired in endless peregrinations as Russell struggles through what seems a dense forest of complexity to build a convincing picture of a logical atomist reality that cannot be easily articulated or, perhaps, satisfactorily articulated at all. This book is useful for understanding the later analytical work of Wittgenstein and those who were influenced by him, but it offers little beyond an historical record of an admirable, albeit failed, attempt to establish a new way of thinking.

SWM

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Good Launching Pad for Russell's More Academic Philosophy, October 23, 1997

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Farffleblex Plaffington (Parnybarnel, Mississippi) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Philosophy of Logical Atomism (Open Court Classics) (Paperback)

This brief work serves as a fine introduction to the academic Russell for those curious about what distinguishes him among philosophers of the twentieth century and/or for those chiefly familiar with his "popular" works, such as "Why I Am Not a Christian" and "Marriage and Morals."

While Philosophy of Logical Atomism certainly does not cover his academic philosophy in depth, and it contains a number of points that he later amended (this is true of much of his academic philosophy), it is a good starting point for the Russell initiate as he can be a very difficult read in other academic texts.

The Theory of Descriptions and the Theory of Types are both presented here. The Theory of Descriptions in its "indefinite" and "definite" form (as opposed to its presence as only the Definite Theory of Descriptions in Principia Mathematica).

Anyone with a serious interest in analytical philosophy should be familiar with this material, and at the very least, the Philosophy of Logical Atomism will defintely tell you who wrote Waverly.

2.0 out of 5 stars Not A Good Edition, January 4, 2011

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The Luth "The Luth" - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Philosophy of Logical Atomism (Open Court Classics) (Paperback)

When I finally opened this book to read Russell's essays (beginning on p. 35), the binding immediately cracked and the next page came loose...not exactly what I was looking for when I bought the book.

You can read all of the essays in this book, and other related ones as well, in "Logic And Knowledge" -- I would recommend that route ...