Betrand Russell Life and Philosophy

if you know anybody please mention that okay Bertrand Russell I still know it's not true actually the key point to remember with Russell he was born in 1871 a blender flyer 72 72 1872 then at the height of Victorian England he wasn't one generation removed from us or two generations removed for us he was he's two world wars the Vietnam War and the coming of the modern era removed from us his childhood experience was not one of the 1870s or 1890s or 1900's it was of the early 1800s to the late 1790s his parents died when he was quite young and so he was raised by his grandparents now his grandparents were conservative by the standards of their own generation so if we'll see this again with Heidegger Heidegger was raised in the 17th century Russell was a little bit better than that but he really his upbringing was very peculiar even for his time on one hand he was a privileged class he was born to a family of minor Nobles in England which is in 70s that's the way to fly but he was very strange upbringing by grandparents that these are the grandparents of the Victorian era that they seem like a caricature one you could not mention sex sex did not exist as a subject there will be no personal contact with your children that's bad children need to be scolded you never show emotion I mean all of the sort of generalities that we have about the Victorian era all of the wrong concepts the oversimplifications no that was them they were whenever you think of a Victorian area this was a highly religious extraordinarily rule-bound very cold showing emotion was showing weakness you never show weakness and therefore you never show emotion and so Russell grew up sort of highly isolated not just from other people although that was partially true because they were raised primarily on the state and primarily with private tutors but also from his own period he they were not allowed really to know what was going on in the world because that might damage their thinking and so as Russell grew up he became a young man and as all young men are as young people generally you became interested in things like other people ideas sexuality none of this was available to and then one day this remarkably bright boy who's been sealed off from the world was given by his older brother a copy of Euclid's theorems and then this happened repeatedly throughout history there is a certain subset of our population when they read Euclid's theorems for the first time they find it a revelation of religious strength here they think is reasoning of the it is it's extraordinarily clear cogent reasoning that has very powerful impact on the mind but to certain people there's one chair up here and when he receives this again it is like a vision he doesn't he cannot release his sexual energy he can't even talk about it he can't even think that he's sexually frustrated because that wasn't even a possible thought he can't think I'm socially isolated I want to share my ideas and feelings with other people because that's not you don't do that you don't show emotions and so his outlet became these theorems and this began his love deep powerful love with both mathematics but with more importantly with rationalism with the knows from that clear cogent reasoning can set you free it was a new world that he could move out of this terrible repressive limiting shell into this pure realm where there are no frustrations where the rules work where you can explore limitless horizons and it would just thrilled him to know him changed his life entirely and he said that more or less is what I want to do and so all of the material that we talked about tonight you want to keep this in mind because then what happens is he enters this realm of pure reasoning Euclid is just an example as we go through his works they'll be more examples and he finds great on one hand release and freedom there but on the other hand it's is an emotional social or intellectual contact with other people and so he'll presume pursue projects that are pure reasoning príncipe mathematic of the principles of mathematics being the most important ones until he meets a woman generally falls in love and all of a sudden well forget all that crap anymore [Music] and then he writes a work like logic and mysticism okay which is just deal because all the sudden he says oh this pure logic there's got to be more well then that all falls apart and he shuts down again and takes himself back into the realm of pure philosophy which ran was pure reason to try and recover to recoup himself to distance himself from the world then he becomes frustrated again and so there's this constant pendulum swinging he never works this out by the way it's a terrifying life to read about in that sense because you see the repeated encounters with these frustrations so that they keep that in mind that his entire life he lived until 1970 what did I say that whatever I said there that's really so he lives through you know the emancipation of women the sexual revolution but he was born in Victorian England and raised damn near Edwardian England and he never reckoned ever quite reconciled that it never was him so he was at war with his times emotionally so enough that intellectually very innovative emotionally and personally spiritually troubled very troubled we'll talk about what happens here because he was so interested in the project of reason he pursued the field of epistemology debates people say we did analytical work in logical order basically his prime focus was epistemology which is the question of what do we know and how do we know it so to give you an outline of this because they'll come up repeatedly I want to start with the question if you know the answer feel free showing up is there a rhinoceros in this room yes see epistemologists never worked that out and here's why by the way that Russell had with Luda dictum Stein and victim Stein well I'm not going to accept that I refuse to accept there's not a rhinoceros in this room probably right this is scary it seems like the simplest proposition in the world there's not a rhinoceros in this room painting the oddness how do we know that or our sense impressions we look around we don't see a rhinoceros as always say well there's not alright oestrus in this room ah just a few teeny-tiny problems with that one what is a rhinoceros notice we're positing an absence we do not have a sense impression of an absence so when we say there's not a rhinoceros in the room what we're really saying is I have a memory or an idea like I don't believe I've ever seen a rhinoceros I had to ponder this I think I know what a rhinoceros is and I compared the room that I sense with a room that I imagine would be like the room is not like my imaginary room therefore there is no rhinoceros here now the problem with that is as I said is that's not a sense data we are not experiencing and lack of a rhinoceros what we're experiencing is a disconnect between what we imagine the room would be like and what the room is actually like according to our sin state and epistemology skov oh that's funny so the world is made up of our memories and imaginations and that's what reality is see how that gets really muddy really fast and haven't we all imagined for instance of the date is going very well only to discover that perhaps our imagination conklin somewhat incorrect misleading less than totally accurate and so distant ologist struggle with this it seems I mean it seems so state there's not a goddamn renessa in the room and yet how do you know this for sure because we think the room would be different if there were and so they go okay how can we face it right because it seems like there's not one we must be able to demonstrate that again also assume how many people have ever actually physically in person scenery I know Souris that's good but but notice how many people have been to Paris wow that's a lot of people but notify said if Paris is not in the room half of us would never have seen the object which I say is not in here and so we wouldn't even be out using a memory of the object that we had experienced to make the clarification about its presence or absence we would be using an idea that we got from God knows where to come up with an imaginary image of the room that we would then compared to our sense data and say well Paris is not in the room that's not a real firm basis to build things on if you try and build reality from sense data then what you're doing is called empiricism basically you you collect all the sensory data that you can you build models and those models are reality this makes you an empiricist originally Bertrand Russell was not an empiricist he is what we call an idealist a platonic idealism this is because if you click what Platonic ideal is to say no no no no no there is in the universe perfect forms there's a perfect rhinoceros there's a perfect room there's perfect things and what we do is unknowingly built into our minds often called a priority are these models and so we're not appealing to sense data although in part we are mostly we're appearing to appealing to the structure of the universe to arrive at some idea of what we mean by things like room and rhinoceros and in and out Bertrand Russell's first project in epistemology was is work called principles of mathematics I think I give you there an example and if it's on the first first page it says pure mathematics is the class of all propositions of the form P implies Q wow that's exciting are you all exciting have you glanced ahead principal mathmatica good that is really some clarifying material there here's what he does because look and this by the way it goes back to comp everything goes back to calm I mentioned that in the first lecture here we are again card had demonstrated that we shouldn't trust things like our idea of rhinoceros or whether or not it's in the room that only have the capacity to build the model as remember I mentioned this as if it were true with one exception he said mathematics mathematics seems so necessarily obviously true that it must be a priority to true before everything before the universe is founding mathematics works in every alternative universe imaginable mathematics works so like Euclid's geometry here seemed to be a realm where we can build truth if we can understand mathematics then we will have absolute total truth from that we can derive any other truths that can possibly be developed this was Russell's golden present about maddux so first step is he said look there is a realm of perfect truth and it begin is in mathematics but turns out that mathematicians don't know why mathematics works it's one of the little tricks they don't tell you about math one plus one equals two we all know that we don't know why it took Russell and Alfred North Whitehead about twelve pages of príncipe Mathematica to demonstrate that proposition we think they may claim hilariously is the occasionally useful proposition that one plus one equals two but it took a lot of work to demonstrate that and when Russell begins working whole sections of mathematics had no logical foundations and so he said this he said math is up here below math sort of more important amount of logical propositions and if we understand the rules of propositions mathematics is a class of all propositions P implies Q if this then that if we understand the proposition sufficiently well then a we can prove all of mathematics nice achievement and then B we can use those rules of proposition constructions to then work on things like is there a rhinoceros in the room and so you turn the proposition is there I rhinoceros in the room and from that into something like this then a proposition in the room then people will be screaming if people are not screaming then there is no rhinoceros are people screaming yes or no if no then no rhinoceros if yes potentially every nostrils but notice all the linguistic content drops away there's no room here there's no rhinoceros here there's just a B P and Q and logical functions V if then or and not joining two of them it turns out I need not an or but here's a couple of others and makes equations easier and so its first one of this was propositional analysis of mathematics great and they make huge strides you cannot understand hard for us to understand the impacts that his book had on mathematical thinkers all over the world he started receiving letters from from the leading mathematicians Cantor a piano they wanted to write him they want to know Wow huge achievement how did you do this what are you doing they buy into conferences all over the world immediately it was this amazing breakthrough and then he ran into some problems the problems were the form of the paradox of well [Music] so with prepositions everything depends on being able to prove something true or false it's either a true statement or a false it's either true proposition or a false proposition if it's true that you do this and it's false you do this it's totally mechanical and then you derive your proofs from that ah this sentence is false or this sentence is a lot well but is the line that is true and if it's not a line then it's false you cannot imagine how much time Bertrand Russell spent doing I mean years ladies and gentlemen just solve these kinds of problems the king of France is bald turns out that that is a perfectly good proposition but there was no King of France so it made sense but it was counterfactual but it was a good composition and so this propositional logic started to crumble on it's all falling apart and he knew it and so on one hand he's getting accolades all over the world from from you know just the most important mathematical thinkers in philosophy and in logic and in math he's going to conferences in Paris a lot of positive feedback at the same time that he knows from talking to the same people that he's in trouble that this project is falling apart at this point also he gets married what you think would be a nice thing unfortunately for Russell it was not what one person described his wife Alice as aggressively dull but apparently quite accurate that she wanted to spend a lot of time with Russell she wanted his affection but she was dull and boring and really didn't want to talk to him at all and and for someone of Russell's intellect this proof sort of painful and from painful for her it was painful on both accounts so so their marriage was strained in the beginning and then it just became worse and worse and worse and so this drove Russell into again the logic even more deeply and he thought you know what I'm gonna come up with a new way of solving this what it came up was what's called a theory of classes so forget propositions we're gonna go into the theory of classes by the way just as a side note this is the theory of propositions this this leads to basically all modern computer programming so it's been just a little bit influential theory of classes he said it's not if the rhinoceros screams or whatever it's now is you have just sets of things set theories you have a set of theories all right Oscar is this B and the question is does the set include the things be all you ever know about anything is it a member of the set or it is not a member of the set they can join or they don't conjoined this turns out to be a huge leap forward I know that seems very abstract and I'm struggling to make it concrete but it which is a significant shift because it changed from if then or else no I mean that's still part of it but now we're just really about concerned about is something part of one set or is it not part of one set this leads to the public in the writing of príncipe Mathematica it's often considered one of the most important works in the history of philosophy logic science and math all at once and he works on this without Fred North Whitehead and in the beginning they're working at a white heat unbelievable progress is being made and then he meets Alfred North Whitehead wife it turns out that miss whitehead is just a wee bit lonely and finds her husband a logician Alfred not all that engaging meanwhile there's Russell the engaging friendly and available because totally alienated from his own wife logician who has moved into their house to work with her husband on this major work Russell begins to have doubt about the importance of the project ah other things have suddenly become really important to him mrs. Whitehead chief amongst them so they strike up an unbelievably complicated relationship and Russell starts to really be concerned about the true value of this project so on one hand he's making huge strides in developing a logic that came very close to achieving their goal which is providing a perfect mathematical perfect logical foundation for all of mathematics which could then be extended to basically the rest of the world it wouldn't prove everything but it would do a lot of work hugely important steps were taken by people who if you're into math logical foundations of mathematics this is the book this is the book so he's struggling on two fronts Ronde is huge I mean truly Titanic took him about six years to finish this work ended up being three volumes so expenses so expensive to print that Russell and Whitehead each had to cough up fifty pounds to help cover the costs which as he wrote down meant that he spent six years of labor and fifty pounds hugely important in mathematics today but notice this little logical problem that arises once again so before we have this sentence is a lot this one ends up being not members of themselves [Music] the class of all classes not members of themselves which are not members of themselves the class we have a class of all the classes that are not a member of themselves so if you have the class it's not a member of itself then it goes into the class of all those classes yes he's coming Colonel just drives a stake right in this heart but the class of all classes not a member not members of themselves well if it is a member of this class and it's a member of the classes it sells and is not a member of this class for this member of this class and it's not a member of this class you work that out it turned out and so yeah so he's just struggling on one hand to produce to finish this project which about halfway through he realized was flawed and he could not come up with the answer turns out there is no answer this is what gödel proves Google's famous in completeness proof 1936 much later than this but that's how long it took to finally prove that this was undoable the project that Russell thought he had done he shows that there is no system that can operate this way there's lots of very good systems that can do lots of work none of them can cover everything there none of them are complete in a mathematical sense and so already he feels this falling apart on him he's like so in one hand he's making huge strides in mathematical logic both by developing propositional logic to a place that had never been and by developing set thirty-two places but never been and by providing logical foundations for whole fields of mathematics that had never been touched before most people and all of his admirers said you're one of the leading minds in the world Russell said see he didn't want partial solutions he didn't want a little bit of the truth he didn't want to court he was going for the absolute truth the Platonic ideal he was an idealist something that's three-quarters true now who cares something that works really good ninety seven of the time no philosophical interest for it wasn't perfect it didn't work for him because again as I mentioned he was in this shell he was trying to build a world that would allow him to escape from the world that he was raised and maybe they basically escaped from himself to a pure clean true world like Euclid's geometry really deeply cannot overestimate the descents that this drove him on and so he feels this collapsing all around him simultaneously his marriage is collapsing and he's in love with a woman whose basically unavailable to him but who loves him very much and they spend a lot of time together just making it all emotional health for all parties while he works with Alfred North Whitehead on this major work of those of their lives and he just becomes frustrated and disgusted and he just basically collapses in heat he called this the vigorous period of his life the writing of this book he said it was a monastic existence which basically it was nineteen three to nineteen six seven eight nine finally finally this wraps up at the same time he divorces his first wife and he begins a relationship with this woman named adalynn Morrell now I mentioned in the introduction or the little piece here his private life was astonishing complex so only the barest outline is possible I just want to give you a suggestion of how complex at this point his private life becomes so he moves from extraordinarily staid Victoria and upgrade to Cambridge very staid to us basically a sterile marriage with a woman he has no feeling for then a little hint of relationship with the wife of his co-worker but there's no example they don't think they ever had sex so very frustrated there and then he meets Adeline Morrell and at one point in his relationship with onlin Morrell and I'm not exaggerating this is all true oddly Morrell is recruiting a lover for Russell because she's tired of being his lover even though Russell wants to marry her and Russell's girlfriend from America's just showing up unexpectedly and moved in with all who they form a team to work against Russell meanwhile adilyn's husband is having an affair with one of Bertrand Russell's best friends and they all travel together I don't know how they look up the string I have no idea how they knew what was going on at any moment why this is important to his philosophy is because again not because it wasn't significant contribution to philosophy it was huge it just didn't meet his goal which was an absolute Platonic ideal he says all right then fine forget that he meets Adalind he falls madly in love romantically a month this is the woman of his dreams he's been waiting for all his life here she is she was hurt like this fifty-fifty on him on one she liked having him around on the other hand she was married to come on divorce her husband chance to have a lot of lovers her husband had several other lovers she didn't see why she should run off with him she's like look no we can sleep together we can have a relationship but he was raised by Victoria right so it runs is called the Bloomsbury group by the way and so all the sudden he finds himself running with this crowd that were not raised by Victoria did not view the world in the Victorian way and it was blowing his mind he never knew exactly how to respond to me so he does two things first as he arrives at work and more or less this arises part of the world comes to us from mysticism inspirational part you can just substitute online for mysticism and the entire book sort of an interesting love letter to Adalind but when you think you must think with logic and so for the first time he allows it to us thinking the notion that there's a part of the world and a part of the human experience that cannot be explained entirely with logic and that part is mysticism again just substitute the word online and you've got it right if that there's this there's romance there's inspiration there's love there's beauty there's aesthetics and you logic doesn't work if you want to think correctly you need logic it's great is it hard to find I think there's an electronic version online interesting lead in context and he does another work which I have here from the analysis of mind if you look at that it's the book is growing out of an attempt to harmonize two different tendencies one in psychology and one in physics it's a long essay he wrote several books on this subject but the key and note here is he switches to since alright I've given up the logical idea I've given up the plot Platonic ideal go don't hate him for this kurt gödel the the math logician probably the most famous mathematician of our century continuously said you had the inspiration from God when you were young and you abandoned your duties to logic and Russell's like well not so much I am so he became an empiricist he said look we know the world through our senses and what we have to do is try and determine the best way to analyse our senses but knowing our senses are misleading he shifted his ground dramatically he said look mathematics is not explained by logic is explained by mathematics and the other empirical sciences all the sudden he says look the role of philosophy is to explain the discoveries of physics and chemistry and mathematics and bring those into the realm of the philosophical discourse that people who do not have access to those fields can understand to explain the world in terms of the empirical results of the physical sciences and again he wrote several very good books in this mode but for him personally this is a dramatic shift of view from the perfect world that we've even derive all our experiences from from no no we need the sciences and then we take their results and we use those to derive the world but he admits that the sciences are limited there's only so much the sciences could know so there's only so much philosophy now and so again he spends a whole period with life writing in this mode Reverend Pierson no absolute truths in the old sense of which he held that the job of philosophy is to just translate science for a general public philosophical public in a broad public too when he writes a book like the ABCs of relativity he feels it's his job to do that but it was negative crushing defeat for him he decided you know what I'm going to abandon philosophy I'm gonna leave Cambridge I don't want to do that anymore and when he wrote ABC's at relativity it turned out to sell many copies he made a lot of money you know look at that I don't want to do this logic stuff anymore it doesn't work it's too limiting I want to be in the world I want to experience things and if I write more popular works I make money and so if you look on the back of the flower here there's a list of what I call readable works the problems of philosophy while I'm not a Christian and inquire to the meaning of truth history of Western philosophy it's at this period just before World War one said he begins writing these works not all of them but this style of work most if you read about him in philosophy books or bogden biographies of them that are philosophical they say although these aren't very important works these are just you know he did for money are you doing for popular or they're just derivative no I think I'm not are you absolutely wrong when he discovered that the logical project was not going to work he was devastated and he so he shifted grounds he said you know my goal my job now is to communicate as best I can with people with with the general public the general educated public and he took these works very seriously now there's some works that he wrote which I have listed here which did not take seriously those come mostly in between the wars he really did just need to make money he would write anything at that point but these he took very seriously he worked very hard on them to try and communicate the best ideas he felt over the past and contemporary philosophy to the general public and they're all readable and I highly recommend them the next list I say is almost impossible principe Mathematica the introduction and principles of mathematics the introduction the actual content of them would be simply impossible [Music] is three volumes just like that not a page turner [Music] and on the first night I recommended that you always read philosophers in their original works with Russell it's not really very good idea unless you have a big background in mathematical logic in which case hey knock yourself out but the key issue here is that really as important as these logical works were to him and to the 20th century mathematics and logic he felt they were failures and he shifted to logic and mysticism his attempts to translate modern science into philosophical language his attempt to bring the greatest thoughts to the broadest population because he thought the logical project was dead so he finishes this and he moves into a new phase in his life he runs for Parliament which is phalaris brewery if anybody did not have a feel for the general mind it was Bertrand Russell okay he was always wrong about everything that didn't have to do with the philosophy and logic and he pursues several unfortunate relationships until he finally marries again to a woman named Dora and he thought here is a forward-looking intelligent which he absolutely was a woman whom I can settle down with and have a family she was a feminist free love advocate a socialist if not a communist and settling down was sort of the last thing on a dime and so he starts his second great tortured marriage and you can see from the first day that this marriage is not going to work and most of his friends tried to explain this to him including many of his lovers just wouldn't listen right and so he sets off and it just does not go well on one hand he wanted a family desperately and he finally got one he had he had two children and he turns his mind now to education do not read rustle of books on education unless you want to laugh no one knew less about being a parent more about raising children than Bertrand Russell I mean it's really this guy because he damaged his children pretty well trying to carry out his philosophical idealist onto children they really did sort of you know they did not have a happy childhood because of this but again it returns to his idea how do you raise children he put this logical framework on it but it was really the way his grandparents had raised him in a weird reproduction of his own childhood you don't want to show them too much feeling they know you love them so we show them too much love that makes them nervous this is one of his arguments yeah yeah so things are not going well for birdie so when things aren't going well what do you do yeah well what she is doing of course vigorously on all sides much to in chagrin even though he's having affairs of course as well he's designed this whole free marriage thing is not working out too well and she decides no I think it is it was enough a logician to realize that he can never win that work right but so he returns to his love of philosophical reasoning and he launches a second development of empiricist thought and this one is the best I think can be conceived up in two ways in which everything mixes and it is undifferentiated describing its relationship to as many other pellets as possible you arrive at an understanding of the world this is a world constantly in flux this is a world of changing but more or less fixed relationships Russell decides that this is the right answer it says where the world is all differentiated little particles not surprising he gets this idea from physics because now the atomic theory of physics is taking off he says look there's the proof the world have made up of little particles and their relationships to each other and that if we can understand that then we'd be able to grasp the nature of these relationships again and so he begins working on a serious attempt to codify all scientific thought into one logical system based on a simplifying as a shot theory of the universe the relationships of any given particle to any others at this point makes a significant breakthrough in his understanding of our understanding of the world in which he says there's actually six dimensions in the universe now we're all used to now think of the universe is having 11 or 27 different this was extraordinarily important and groundbreaking at the time he says there's not three dimensions as we're known then he says there's actually six and he starts developing the small a few papers published on this but he did voluminous writing never published because he breaks it off of course when he starts another affair but he made a lot of progress in trying to work out this third version of the universe this version of the universe by the way is is beginning to triumph at the moment modern modern string theory is failing and so which was and so the math of this version advanced particle physics is beginning to look right and Russell's work on this is becoming more important suddenly after after lapse of many many years as repeatedly happens with them his work here's also foundation of us today called analytical philosophy as a technical field that again you can see the analysis of the relationship of any part of the universe to any other part of the universe and the logical implications that go with it and so his technical work continues on well until again another you know horribly doomed failed complicated personal crisis hits him he starts dating this other woman his wife has two more kids by another man even though they're still married it wants nothing to do with them ugly breakup and he switches again and how many of you read anything people read things by Russell yeah probably not principal bathmat of my guests Jess on the top of my head and she switches back again to do more of this popular work and again this discretion that is raised in the minds of many of the philosophers right above us he broke off this wonderful project to do work for the masses but it raises an interesting ethical question which is his important work several people when I said I was gonna do Russell said reading Russell's were the most important intellectual events of my life major breakthrough huge insights emotional change that's pretty good that's that's a significant impact and so that one of the debates that goes on about Russell is what is he important for he's certainly important for these technical achievements but most lost we're sort of to mark him down for spending so much time writing books like Oh an incredible meaning in truth or or a history of Western philosophy and the hallmark of most of those works and if you've read him you can certainly I think appreciate this is not necessarily logical and that's what he was freed up by when he when he moved to empiricism he could finally accept that the world might not in fact make total and complete sense it might and it might be incomplete and it might be unknowable in some ways but there is still a lot we can work out there's still a lot we can think about and figure out if we apply careful reasoning and so he chose subjects about which very little careful reasoning engine we've been done famously he wrote me why I'm not a Christian and he wrote this book really there's not a lot that's new in that essay that's just simply an essay one of the but he finally sat down he said let's look at this with as much concision and reason as we possibly can and he said if we extract emotion from it and we extract mythology from it it doesn't look very reasonable at all he says let's do that with marriage if we extract emotion from it right it doesn't look very reasonable at all let's do that with education and it turns out on one hand it generates powerful insights on the other hand if you extract emotion out of the marriage relationship it's gonna skew things a touch right and so he struggled with the same thing continuously he wants to apply logic to everything and he turns it on too many subjects were that there had not been that much careful logical analysis before Christianity the marriage relationship the liberation of women the education of children he says these have been ruled by custom these have been ruled by emotion this has been ruled by this is the way people have done it for 150 years this is way we'll have to do it and sometimes he's right and sometimes he's wrong but it's really early breakthrough surprisingly but is to just say let's really look at these he shares this with Nietzsche if you remember from Nietzsche he just said you know what let's try and look at carefully as we can is what's going around here and think about it as well as we can the distinction is Nietzsche had no necessary need for logic he was a very reasonable person it implied reason a lot and he had a and each had a a very good feel for other human beings Russell that all the evidence suggests he never did to the point where I'm I mentioned earlier that he was dating online his lover and this woman is coming over from the United States - she thinks probably marry him which is of course absurd but that's what she thought and she's living with online don't ask me how that happens very common online is at Russell's house for drinks and tea and chat and not perhaps sex and there's a knock at the door and Russell doesn't answer not only are you gonna answer he says no it's that woman from America she does it every day she knocks and weeps out there on the steps like well should you talk to her he's like no I don't want anything to do with her she sort of realizing other hand this was also his power his capacity to say you know what let's just get all that emotional crap out of here let's really look at this without being blinded in a way by the human need you said let's look at the human and everything human all too human that's what I wasn't talking about I'm talking about the human Russell tries the opposite tact can we apply human reason well enough to basically get us out the human can we find a spot to stand that from which we can look down on or up on or cross at human beings where we don't have any biases for our own histories ideas mental images of emotional feelings do not so totally distort our understanding of the world that we that we can't understand the truth of a situation of a historical fact of what's going on and so if you looks at Russell by the way his collected works or I think 36 37 volumes you know lots he wrote lots and lots and lots and he was a very good writer so he wrote he could write with great facility about virtually anything at high speed whether it had any merit or not you could do it we serve a blessing and a curse but that one of the consistent things through all of his work is this idea can I get outside into human yes but that is a misunderstanding of Nietzsche but he did say that but we could talk about were you here for the Nietzsche lecture we talked about that very subject but but this is the idea right can we get out of the human perspective is that possible as close as anybody's ever gotten Russell has done it how many people struggle with mathematics people also struggle with mathematics this is very strong is that it's not a natural human way of thinking that we can't do it it's not what we'd like to do it's not how we normally view the world and so it takes a very special kind of training which we are all accept we all can do and so we can start thinking about the world in ways that are sort of they're not inhuman because we can do them but it's not normally human what Russell did is try to develop those into an absolute philosophical system for discovering the truth without the interference of human bias I mean that was a great idea right I mean on one hand plow the hubris the amazing desire to do this on the other hand spotty and results sometimes it was right on yet his history Western philosophy even even professional philosophers have to admit that he's got some good material in there principe Mathematica huge step forward and I understanding of mathematics and foundation of wanting principles of mathematics start a whole new field basically of mathematical and of reasoning which is used in everything game theory computers programming is hugely applied but also he likes they got totally wrong on so many other things like education of children like the nature of relationships between men and women um he and iam art D H Lawrence got in endless arguments about this cuz Lawrence had his own wacky ideas but for Lawrence he said like it's love this is discovery of another human being to defeat loneliness and create love and Russell's like why are you talking about loneliness and love I'm talking about human relationships and Laura's just begins pounding his head on the dash oh those guys what do you mean why am i talking about love and loneliness and Russell's like look you have a proposition man and woman no it's not a proposition so a very peculiar outlook so finally his later works so if you go to our knowledge of the external world [Music] he he travels around he breaks up with his second wife who long litigation because she has two of his kids she's had two kids by somebody else Russell has a noble title now I think he's in rural and so who's going to be able to claim the title when Russell passes all right who wants it to be his older son the money issues are all that of course we've had World War one and World War two I mean it's just a mess right and he returns to this notion of a search for how do we understand the world and so this is this is one of his later works our knowledge of the external world just a quick note from this first sentence give you a sense of it among the objects to the reality of objects of sense there is one which is derived from apparent difference between matter and how they appear in physics and things as they appear in sensation men of science for the most part are willing to condemn immediate data as nearly subjective and he wants to in some sense now defend immediate data so get a huge shift here platonic ideals forget sense data it's just wrong to well physics access to material reality physicists chemists mathematicians will use that in an empirical way to construct a model of the universe finally he sort of ends up you know what I think we can build a model of consciousness logically coherent everything what Russell is always logically coherent but that will allow us to use since data in the following way while it may not be perfect it is the best model of the universe we can ever have so this is over the course of his life this is you know 60 years almost of philosophizing he ends up making this argument which is to say look we need to take our sense data and organize them as logically as you can this is not going to produce perfection but this is going to produce the best approximation of the actual actual universe that we can ever derive it's a very limited sort of epistemology from I will prove the foundations of all possible knowledge with perfect logical precision to you know what are since data a little bit dodgy but is the best model we can we can develop there is not a rhinoceros in the room how do we know you know it's messy but it's the best we can do there is not a rhinoceros in the room I have some concept of whatever in oestrus is I can imagine the impactor and oestrus would have on my life if it were in here I don't see those things so I used my sense data and my memories to build a model of the world that looks pretty good philosophers do not like this because he abandons the notion of having the absolute realm of truth and and modern philosophical discourse is nothing if not dedicated to particularly anglo-american forget the French people we'll talk about them later but I think of American philosophy it is dedicated to a pursuit of either empirical perfection borrowing the model from the sciences or platonic ideals borrowing the models from logic both of which basically Russell laid out and abandoned but he ends up at almost so James Ian and will do so James almost at James II and pragmatism and he says well I don't know maybe I can't prove absolutely to that there's not a rhinoceros in the room but by God I think there probably isn't and if we take a poll we'll all believe there probably isn't and and that's what we have to do an example he gave of this proposition even earlier in his life was he said as a young man he had been quite scared because one of the preachers had begun preaching about the the end of the world is nigh the world is going to be destroyed it's the second coming the end of all he said he's walking home and he saw that the preacher was planting apple trees in his yard I felt greatly comforted by that discussion because it seemed inconsistent with the philosophy which he had been preaching and so he this is where he ends up and he says you know we're all planting apple trees in our yards more or less and that's what we do not because it's perfect not because our knowledge is perfect not because our logic is perfect but given the empirical data that we have through our senses that's the best we can do now we have to reason as carefully as we possibly can but at the end of the day what we're going to be stuck with is like I said there is not a rhinoceros in this room Bertrand like I said again in the beginning I really believe and work

Channel: Wes Cecil

Views: 57,902

Rating: 4.77665 out of 5

Keywords: Bertrand Russel, Philosophy, Lectures, Wes Cecil

Id: lDg4rpGwIx0

Length: 60min 20sec (3620 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 29 2012