Bertrand Russell
( 1872 – 1970 )
British philosopher, mathematician, logician and public figure. One of the founders of analytic philosophy and a part of the British revolt against idealism (particularly Hegel). In his The Principles of Mathematics (1903) and the Principia Mathematica (1910-13), written together with A. N. Whitehead, he demonstrated how mathematics can be reduced to logic, which had a big influence on the development of classical logic.
Russell’s major contribution to philosophy was the demonstration that symbolic logic could be used as a tool for philosophical analysis. A key feature of his view is that philosophy is subordinate to science and that philosophical knowledge should be built on science, because there is less risk of error in science than philosophy.
Russell’s major tool of analysis in philosophy was Occam’s razor – a problem-solving principle that states that entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity. If there are multiple theories or explanatory models, the simpler one, with fewer parameters should be preferred. Russell thought that we should try to explain the world in terms of those aspects we have direct acquaintance with, and avoid coming up with the existence of anything with which we cannot be acquainted.
His major contribution to philosophy is his theory of descriptions, which he set out in his essay On Denoting (1905). His goal was to unveil the logical structure of propositions about existence in order to eliminate paradoxes and metaphysically empty statements. He showed that the grammatical form of a sentence is not necessarily identical to its logical form, and that through grammar, sentences often incorrectly contain a claim of existence and uniqueness. However, he showed that these can be separated from the content of a proposition and treated on its own.
Take for example the sentence: “The golden mountain does not exist”.
Even though the sentence seems to be true from an ordinary point of view, logically, it is meaningless. The grammatical structure of the sentence treats the golden mountain as a subject – an entity about which true or false statements can be made – when in reality, the golden mountain exists only as a concept (no golden mountains exist in the world of sense experience, hence the the idea of one is purely imaginary and anything said about it is meaningless),
To account for entities that exist only as concepts, previous philosophers tried solving the problem by saying that such terms refer to ideas that exist in a transcendental realm (the Platonic world of Forms for example), but not in reality.
Russell shows that ‘the golden mountain’ does not have to be treated as a grammatical subject (and thus ascribed existence as a concept), but as a denoting the properties of a thing X that are ‘golden’ and ‘mountainous’.
He shows that the correct meaning of the sentence is: “There exists no entity X to which the properties of being golden and mountainous can be ascribed to”. In this formulation, the sentence is not logically meaningless, but true.
Bertrand Russell was also an advocate for various social and political causes, especially pacifism, anti-imperialism and nuclear disarmament. He also wrote the popular and commercially successful book A History of Western Philosophy (1945), which presents and summarises Western philosophy from pre-Socratic times to the 20th century.