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Forgotten Vintage*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

R. E. Tully
R. E. Tully
Affiliation:
St. Michael's College, University of Toronto
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Extract

Anyone interested in the development of analytic philosophy will likely find Russell's Theory of Knowledge a work of great importance in itself; but anyone who, in addition, is fascinated by scholarly mystery and the psychology of philosophers will certainly regard its publication at last, nearly three-quarters of a century after Russell abandoned it unfinished—principally because of the young Wittgenstein's virulent criticisms—as an event nothing short of momentous. Theory of Knowledge may well have played as important a role in Wittgenstein's early work (from the Notebooks to the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) as the Tractatus itself did in his later writings—each representing for Wittgenstein an attitude, a philosophical method, and above all a theory of propositions, against which he was driven to react. But it would be a sad irony if renewed interest in Wittgenstein's early work were to eclipse all over again the very piece of writing which helped move him to creative rebellion. Unlike the two previous volumes in the Collected Papers (numbers 1 and 12), which broaden rather than deepen our knowledge of his philosophical growth, Theory of Knowledge deserves to become a standard text in Russell studies. It contains crucial material not found elsewhere in his writings and hence it fills a gap—ironically,, a gap Russell himself created—in what we know of his thought in the years immediately preceding the outbreak of World War I, when his career at Cambridge was at its apogee.

Type
Critical Notices/Etudes Critiques
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 27 , Issue 2 , Summer 1988 , pp. 299 - 320
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1988

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References

1 As quoted in Clark, R. W., The Life of Bertrand Russell (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), 202Google Scholar. Russell was writing to Lady Ottoline Morrell, who was at this time his mistress. Much of our information regarding this episode in Russell's career comes from this correspondence.

2 Ibid., 206.

3 Russell, Bertrand, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, vol. 2 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1968), 57Google Scholar. A brief allusion to Wittgenstein's criticism occurs in another letter printed on 74.

4 Russell, Bertrand, My Philosophical Development (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1959), 112Google Scholar Russell incorrectly dates the typescript of “Notes on Logic” to the beginning of 1914.

5 Russell, , Theory of Knowledge, 46Google Scholar. (Subsequent page references to this volume will be given in parentheses in the body of the text.)

6 Cf. Russell, Bertrand, Logic and Knowledge, ed. Marsh, R. C. (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1956), 222.Google Scholar

7 Cf. Russell's hesitant remarks about the argument based on egocentric particulars near the end of his final lecture (Logic and Knowledge, 280).Google Scholar

8 Russell vacillates somewhat between the view that imagination involves no time relation whatever and the view that what ultimately distinguishes sensation and imagination involves only correlations among particulars (cf. especially 62). In a later summary, however, only the former view is mentioned (100).

9 Russell, Bertrand, The Principles of Mathematics (2nd ed.; London: George Allen & Unwin, 1950), 95.Google Scholar

10 Ibid., 49–50.

11 Russell, Bertrand, The Problems of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 73.Google Scholar

12 The theory of judgment Russell outlines in The Problems of Philosophy had first been set out (with the very same example) in his essay, “On the Nature of Truth and Falsehood”, published in Philosophical Essays (rev. ed.; London: George Allen & Unwin, 1966; first published in 1910), 147–159.Google Scholar

13 Russell, , The Problems of Philosophy, 74.Google Scholar

14 Quoted in the Introduction, xxvii.

15 See his Discourse on Metaphysics, §§10–12.

16 This comment may show the influence of Wittgenstein's emerging views. The idea that propositions are not names for facts but have a polarity of True and False was explicitly attributed to Wittgenstein in the first lecture of The Philosophy of Logical Atomism (see Russell, , Logic and Knowledge, 187).Google Scholar

17 In this section, Russell departs from his usual practice of representing the terms of a relation by lowercase letters.

18 Because of the Othello example, Russell's theory is often characterized as a fourtermed theory of judgment, but in fact any finite number of terms from three on would be possible on his approach.

19 Both the details and the excerpts are taken from the volume's Introduction (written by Professor Eames) and from Clark's, The Life of Bertrand Russell, 204–206).Google Scholar

20 Cf. Griffin, Nicholas, “Wittgenstein's Criticisms of Russell's Theory of Judgment”, Russell (Winter 1985–1986), 132–143Google Scholar. (Footnotes 10 and 11 of Griffin's article refer to further work along this line.)

21 Cf. Russell, , Logic and Knowledge, 226Google Scholar; also “Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description”, in Mysticism and Logic (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1917), 220Google Scholar, fn. 1. The older theory he refers to was that first published in Philosophical Essays.

22 Clark, , The Life of Bertrand Russell, 204.Google Scholar

23 Ibid., 205.