The Philosophy of Logical Atomism

by Bertrand Russell, David Pears (Editor)

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.

Genres: Philosophy, Logic, Nonfiction, Stem, Theory, Science, Classics

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS, was a Welsh philosopher, historian, logician, mathematician, advocate for social reform, pacifist, and prominent rationalist. Although he was usually regarded as English, as he spent the majority of his life in England, he was born in Wales, where he also died.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950 "in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought."

Reviews

[Homa]

نصفش رو خوندم و هرچی بیشتر پیش میرفتم انگیزه ام برای ادامه کمتر شد. با این حال برای آشنایی با پایه های فلسفه تحلیلی خوب بود. شاید زمانی دیگه انگیزه کافی برای این کتاب و موضوع پیدا کردم.

[ZaRi]

The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.
[Leibniz] was always engaged in trying to construct such as mathematical logic as we have now... and he was always failing because of his respect for Aristotle... Whenever he invented a really good system, it always brought out that [Aristotle's logic] is fallacious... He could not bring himself to believe that it is fallacious, so he began again. That shows that you should not have too much respect for distinguished men.


I am sorry that I have to leave so many problems unsolved. I always have to make this apology, but the world really is rather puzzling and I cannot help it.
[The] belief in the physical world has established a sort of reign of terror. You have got to treat with disrespect whatever does not fit into the physical world. But this is really unfair to things that do not fit it. They are just as much there as the things that do.


The longer one pursues philosophy, the more conscious one becomes how extremely often one has been taken in by fallacies, and the less willing one is to be quite sure that an argument is valid if there is anything about it that is at all subtle or elusive, at all difficult to grasp.


"I believe the only difference between science and philosophy is that science is what you more or less know and philosophy is what you do not know. Philosophy is that part of science which at present people choose to have opinions about, but which they have no knowledge about. Therefore every advance in knowledge robs philosophy of some problems which formerly it had.
The philosopher has an adventurous disposition and likes to dwell in the region where there are still uncertainties.

[Mathematical logic] makes [philosophy] dry, precise, methodical, and in that way robs it of a certain quality that it had when you could play with it more freely. I do not feel that it is my place to apologize for that, because if it is true, it is true. If it is not true, of course, I do owe you an apology; but if it is, it is not my fault, and therefore I do not feel I owe any apology for any sort of dryness or dullness in the world.


Acquire a taste for mathematics, and then you will have a very agreeable world."

[Arya Tabaie · Rating 4 out of 5]

1) Russell advocates a very interesting maxim for "doing metaphysics", that you should put forward your doctrines merely in a formal way, something "vulnerable" which could be challenged by possibly more powerful or more consistent ones; and any interesting intuitive metaphysical idea should only be a byproduct of it. I don't think he sticks to this principle of his in this book. He made a lot of big metaphysical assertions about what "exists in the world" that I personally wasn't comfortable with at all.

2) Much of what was said about universals and existence is intuitively obvious and trivial for any mathematically educated person in the 21st century, something you'd learn in middle school, and apparently was seen as difficult and strange by Russell's audience in the early 20th. That probably is the best fate a theory can hope for: To become so deeply ingrained in people's minds that it would be difficult to imagine the world before it.

[Emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

For my Philosophy of Language class.

[Adrienne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I learned that metaphysical inquiry has stalled due to questions about epistemological methods; learned that quibbling over the ways to reason can sometimes keep us from moving the discussion forward; was struck by the argument that statements of belief are statements of fact (from the perspective of the believer, of course) and that in a purely deductive way such statements are like empirical knowledge gained. Beliefs are subjective and absolute simultaneously (an absurdity that almost discounts pure reason as the only way to go).

[Daniel García · Rating 5 out of 5]

Se me había olvidado actualizar sobre este libro, que leí durante el verano, estudiándolo con ganas y disfrutándolo muchísimo. Al final, hasta asomó la patita para el tema que me cayó en las opos. La teoría de las definiciones de Russell es tremendo banger filosófico que te cambia la concepción de muchísimas cosas. Y no puedes pretender meterte en serio con Wittgenstein hasta que no hayas entendido algo de atomismo lógico. Son unas conferencias, entonces no es un texto demasiado técnico (aunque requiere lectura atenta y su poquito de dedicación).

Leída en la traducción de Alfredo Deaño, que está en la edición de Alianza de "La concepción analítica de la filosofía" (primer volumen).

[Gary Bruff · Rating 5 out of 5]

“When I say that something is ‘undeniable’, I mean it is not the sort of thing that anybody is going to deny; it does not follow from that that it is true, though it does follow that we shall all think it true – and that is as near to truth as we seem able to get.”
– Bertrand Russell, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism (p.3)

In devising his logical system, Russell looked up to logic’s cousins, mathematics and science, while also applying logical analysis to real human, living-and-breathing speakers/hearers of actual language. As he demonstrated by his technique of logical analysis, Russell respected the productive power and epistemic limitations of everyday linguistic expressions. While seeming at times to revel in paradox, Russell nevertheless was committed to seeking clarity in his (for its time) highly linguistic form of semantic analysis. Ultimately, Russell was fascinated by the prospect of systematically defining all that can be defined and naming all that can be named. Beyond these meaningful acts of definition and nomenclature, Russell saw only nonsense.

Let names and naming furnish an entry into Russell’s system. It appears Russell believed that names serve simply as abbreviations for descriptions. Thus, ‘Socrates’ is short for ‘teacher of Plato’, ‘drank the hemlock’, ‘founded a doctrine of civil disobedience’, etc. Russell seemed to conflate acts of naming with similar notions of definiteness and specificity, topics which he vigorously delved into in other works. The word ‘this’, for example, being semantically fixed to a specific use-context, was treated in Russell’s system as a proper name for whatever is the ‘present object of attention.’ ‘This’ points to what is intended to be taken as identifiable to the hearer in the immediate speech situation, serving as an ‘emphatic particular.’ Russell’s philosophy of meaning was therefore akin to pragmatics, being grounded more in valuing variables and completing ‘incomplete symbols’ during discourse than in compiling true descriptions into abstract and formal definitions. And Russell had reason to be wary of definitions. By analyzing data extruded from natural language, Russell recognized that definitions, being words for words, in many cases tend to circularity, even when used accurately.

Gareth Evans devised a somewhat different schema for interpreting names (“The Causal Theory of Names” (1973)). Reacting against Kripke’s theory, for whom a name’s denotation is rigidly fixed through a chain of reference that goes from the dubbing of someone or something with a name along a chain of users of that name until we get to the current times. Evans calls this theory of denotation ‘nothing short of magical,’ since a name’s reference, who or what the name denotes, would thereby become a function of all of the metaphysically preserved ‘causal’ links in the chain, even if that chain should stretch back to the birth/dubbing of ‘Socrates’. As an alternative to Kripke’s interpretation of names, Evans’ theory found the real basis for valuing a name to have its source in the speaker’s body of information. Such information derives mostly from the common knowledge one learns from one’s community. Russell’s account of names seems to be closer to Evans’ than to Kripke’s, for names do typically serve as abbreviations for sets of descriptions, which in turn are learned from someplace, and not always in the same place.

Many of the ideas found in The Philosophy of Logical Atomism emerged from the metalinguistic concepts defined by the young Wittgenstein, who postulated that the world is made up of facts and not of things. For both the young Wittgenstein and his teacher Russell, an object is what it is on account of its relations to other objects, or else its interpretation is grounded in properties given to the observer as sense data. These relations and properties make up the facts that make up the world. Language works as a system of logical atoms, whose corresponding propositions map to facts more or less accurately. But according to Russell, propositions are not enumerated among the actual things in the world. They are in fact mostly spontaneous products of a human mind. Yet it is essential to remember that facts in the world do exist independently of any observer. And so it is our responsibility as speakers (and hearers) to approximate as accurately as possible those facts represented in our talk.

For Russell, words are simple symbols, and sentences are complex symbols made up of simple symbols. The point of logical atomism is to find those sentences which relate symbols to one another in the same ways the corresponding objects relate to one another in a fact (in the world, not in the language). This opens a way for a semi-mathematical logical analysis of actual speech. For example, in the speaker’s (or philosopher’s) act of logical analysis, one often detects a propositional function that contains variables which need to be valued. These variables include, inter alia, things like quantifiers (like ‘all’ or ‘some’), pronouns, ellipses, tenses, and sentences containing undetermined constituents (mostly predicates in search of their subjects). A propositional function can itself be quantified and thus has modality (essential, possible, or impossible). A proposition, on the other hand, is formed once the variables of its function are valued in a given context or speech situation. Unlike a propositional function with its modality (must be, can be, can’t be), a complete proposition can only be either true or false.

But the facts, atomic or otherwise, can be slippery and hard to pin down. Russell makes this clear in his excessively empiricist notion of ‘logical fictions.’ Logical fictions are representations of types, series, or classes. For Russell, someone might claim to see x (perhaps the same object one sees every day), but what is seen is not x, the object itself, but a symbolized series of experiences, based in sense impressions and often spread out across time or space. When referring to something, we denote a class of similar experiences (the thing itself, like a certain desk perceived over several times), which belongs to a higher class (class of all desks), and to a higher more abstract class (such as furniture), and so forth. This hierarchy of abstraction adds to the molecular complexity of logical fictions. But it also makes the everyday talk of ordinary folk both capable of producing novel expressions as well as amenable to logical analysis.

For Russell’s 1918 Philosophy of Logical Atomism, and for legions of analytical philosophers who have emerged in the century since, the power of logic must be harnessed in order to make our fuzzy notions of the world both clear and precise. The philosophers and linguists handle ‘precise’ tolerably well, yet they seem to fail through their analyses to make our semantic notions in any normal sense ‘clear’. For some very good reasons, language is seldom as clear and precise as it could be. For example, we do not have words for each experience with a particular object but instead rely on classes of classes, or types of types, logical fictions that make our language more efficient as a system of signification. And especially when it comes to the valuing of variables (like the variable ‘I’ translated into ‘reference to person currently speaking’), speakers show that their language can be relativized to contexts in complex ways. For these reasons, Russell seems resigned to the fact that a logically perfect language is untenable: “It would be altogether incredibly inconvenient to have an unambiguous language, and therefore mercifully we have not got one.” (p, 23) It is neither necessary nor desirable for language to map the world along all of its precise contours. But importantly for Russell, our language’s productive capacity can enable us to comprehend or communicate the meaning of a proposition, even if we had never heard that proposition before. And in most cases, that is enough.

“I believe the only difference between science and philosophy is, that science is what you more or less know and philosophy is what you do not know.” (p. 124)

In addition to being a renowned disciple of logic, Russell was also a prolific mathematician and historian of Western philosophy. This gave him an unusually broad perspective on Western science, which he applied to questions of semantics with often blunt realism. (As an aside, I feel that contemporary models of AI would not have gotten very far without the groundwork laid by logicians like Russell and Wittgenstein.) Russell respected real science, so I believe he was well aware that metaphors like ‘atomic’ or ‘molecular’ were just that, metaphors. Russell did not make the mistake Baker made in Atoms of Language of looking for an actual homology between syntactic parameters and the periodic table of elements.

In lacking symbolic calculus (somewhat of a fetish for modern semanticists), this set of lectures flows rather freely. I am reminded of Bach’s Informal Lectures on Formal Semantics, also a cogent and well written little book of lectures on semantic phenomena which are usually treated formally with symbols and operators. Aside from its easy to read lecture style, another facet of Philosophy of Logical Atomism that I really like is its curious complementarity with generative grammar. A generativist creates derivations which represent the algorithmic production of sentences built up from lexical items and their local movements. Russell goes in the opposite direction, positing the logical analysis of natural sentences into their smallest parts, yielding atomic facts by teasing complex symbols apart.

The Philosophy of Logical Atomism has a lot more to it than I have been able to represent in this review. But I heartily recommend this book to all who are interested in the interstices of philosophy and linguistics. And it is a freebee on the web.

[James Klagge · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great introduction to analytic philosophy. It includes 8 lectures that Russell gave in 1918 presenting his views at the time (which were always in flux). I first read these lectures when I was a sophomore in college, in 1973, and they convinced me to become a philosophy major. And look where that led... I went on to UCLA to get my PhD, and took a seminar in 1981 from David Pears on "The Middle Russell and the Early Wittgenstein." Portions of that became the Introduction to this book.
Russell may be wrong about just about everything, but his discussions are always clear and interesting and rich.
The lectures came at a difficult point in Russell's life. During WWI Russell had advocated for pacifism. This led to his dismissal from his post at Trinity College Cambridge in 1916, and then led to his arrest in 1917 for anti-war activity. These lectures were given every Tuesday for several weeks in early 1918. Between lectures 3 and 4 he was sentenced to 6 months prison. But there is no sign of this turmoil in his lectures. He served the time after the lectures were finished, and he later reported: "I found prison in many ways quite agreeable. I had no engagements, no difficult decisions to make, no fear of callers, no interruptions to my work. I read enormously; I wrote a book, 'Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy'...." In his Autobiography he recounts his WWI prison experience in which the warder asks his religion. He replied “agnostic.” The warder asked him how to spell it. When Russell did so, the warder wrote it down remarking, “Religions are many, but I suppose they all believe in the same God.” Russell writes that this exchange kept him cheerful for a week.
I have taught this book in classes well over a dozen times over the years. Anyone interested in analytic philosophy should read it.

[فيصل · Rating 2 out of 5]

الكتاب لم يعد متوفراً في المكتبات وكذلك غير مشهور على الرغم من أهميته في توضيح فلسفة راسل. وهو عبارة عن ترجمة لبعض المحاضرات التي نشرت لبرتراند راسل في إحدى المجلات.

يتحدث فيها راسل عن فلسفته التي فرضت نفسها عليه في محور اهتمامه بفلسفة الرياضيات على الرغم بأنه لم يحدد العلاقة المنطقية بينهما وهي فلسفة الذرية المنطقية. تحدث أيضاً عن مذهبه في اللغة المنطقية؛ فالكلمات أو جزئيات اللغة لابد لها تحقق في الواقع تشير إليه باستثناء طبعاً مفردات مثل (إلا، كلا، في الخ..). وهذا مطلب صعب جداً لذا نجد اللغة اليومية المنطوقة بعيدة جداً عن اللغة بهذا المعيار. لذا لابد من تبسيط القضايا وتكفيكها إلى تلك الجزئيات ثم الحكم عليها. ولكن عندما ننتقل من الاسم الى المحمول الذي يحمل بطبعه صورة لقضية ما مثل قولنا " أحمر" سنرى الوضع صار أكثر تعقيداً ثم يستطرد أكثر في الحديث عن العلاقات.

الترجمة رديئة نوعاً ما. ومعالجة راسل للقضايا ليست بشكل عميق كما في كتبه الأخرى وسبب ذلك لأن الكتاب بالأصل محاضرات.

[Megan Fritts · Rating 4 out of 5]

Russell takes pains (generally) to not muddle his message, while keeping the text from dryness with his down-to-earth writing style and dry humor. Does not seem to be an overly-rigid treatment of the subject, though this is likely due to the fact that it is a lecture series, and wasn't originally created as a book.

[lucas · Rating 3 out of 5]

provides a nice historical/philosophical context for wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico Philosophicus.

[Jim McQuiggin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A brilliant premise that was ultimately wrong.

[Alexander · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this before reading Wittgenstein's Tractatus.

[Marko Bobić · Rating 5 out of 5]

prema kojem je to kriterijumu "za svaku tvrdnju potreban dokaz"? tvrdnja "svaka tvrdnja neophodno zahteva dokaz" takođe zahteva dokaz. ako ga ne ponudiš, imaš tvrdnju bez dokaza, i time protusloviš (iliti pučki pljuješ si u usta) samome sebi.

šaljivo ću reći, smatram da se lingistička filozofija mora znati pre nego što se bilo koja reč izusti.
najveći problem lingvističke filozofije stoji u tome da se zagonetkom pokušava razrešiti zagonetka. odatle nije ni čudo što mnogi ističu konfuznost materije. čak, rekao bih, pokušaji razlučivanja sitankse reči (ne rečenice) daju suprotan efekat od rešenja. zagonetka postaje samo zagonentnija i sve više se ograničenja ljudske analitičnosti podebljava. rekao bih da je to postao i cilj, što više nemogućnosti prikazno sagledati. međutim, u tim ograničenjima se nalazi najveća "mudrost" koju sam ja našao u celoj filozofiji. uvek se ozarim količinom detaljnosti, sitničavosti, kada se razmatraju linvgistički problemi. u samim rečima, pa onda i u njihovom redosledu skriva se najveći deo misterioznosti čoveka. uopšteno govoreći, i Russell i Wittgenstein nasleđuju i pretpostavljaju stari aristotelovski ideal da struktura jezika odražava strukturu stvarnosti, da postoji izomorfija između ta dva reda. naprimer može se zamisliti sve ono što nije logički kontradiktorno, odnosno što ima logički status. npr., supermen nije logički kontradiktoran pojam, moguće je zamisliti čoveka kojem dodaš razne "super" karakteristike, u njemu nema ničega kontradiktornog (kao što je primer kontradiktoran pojam "okruglog trougla", pa je posledično i nezamisliv). međutim, iz zamislivosti takav pojam ima samo mentalnu egzistenciju, postoji u umu, ali nema ekstramentalnu (nismo do sad detektirali entitet poput supermena, a osim toga verovatno se tako što protivi zakonima prirode, pa je nomološki nemoguće, iako je logički moguće u nekom svetu koji nije nomološki identičan našem). dakle: logička besmislenost pojma (npr. okrugli trougao) automatski implicira i to da je tako što ontološki nemoguće da postoji. logički smislen ili konzistentan pojam može imati mentalnu egistenciju, što znači da postoji mogućnost da ima i ekstramnelnu(iliti uvslovljeno rečeno "stvarnu").

[Peachy Keen · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's Bertrand Russell, which means the writing is generally clear and readable, and often (for philosophy) enjoyable or entertaining.

The lectures sketch out what logical atomism is, what concerns for it there may be (and Russell tries to reply to these concerns). As Russell puts it, more or less, logical atomism means that "one does believe the world can be analysed into a number of separate things with relations and so forth" (49), in contrast with monistic logic "of the people who more or less follow Hegel" (36). From the few comments Russell makes about monistic logic, it seems to hold that the ways we divide up the world in how we think about it are basically fictions: the only thing that really exists is the one undivided being (or some such, which I think is basically Parmenides's view). Russell is saying, basically, "No, there really are particulars that have properties, factor in relations and facts, and such. And then there are things, like propositions, that are useful things we've invented and don't belong in an 'inventory of the world.'" The thought that there are particulars, with properties, relations, etc., is the logical atomist view.

I give it 4 stars because he really doesn't say enough about the monistic logic that he is countering, even though it is the motivation for the logical atomist view. The index indicates only a handful of pages on the topic. From what I've heard about Hegel, it seems plausible addressing monism more substantially would make the lectures much more complicated. But otherwise they're just a bit thin, and easy. Russell has intuitiveness on his side, but Hegelians knew intuition was against them (as did pragmatists, another of Russell's regular opponent views).

So, Russell neatly lays out his philosophical view, but there's no real defense of it. Still, we should all aspire to his quality in actually laying out his view; he is attentive to and explicit about the influence of mathematics and philosophical methods (skepticism, empiricism, analysis) on his philosophy.

[A YOGAM · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dieser Band enthält die berühmten Vorlesungen zum logischen Atomismus, mit denen Bertrand Russell eine der einflussreichsten Strömungen der analytischen Philosophie begründete. In ihnen entwickelt er eine Ontologie, die die Welt als Gefüge logisch unabhängiger Tatsachen versteht.
Neben grundlegenden metaphysischen Fragestellungen behandelt das Werk auch wissenschaftstheoretische Themen vor dem historischen Hintergrund des Ersten Weltkriegs. Bis heute zählt der Band zu Russells meistdiskutierten und meistzitierten philosophischen Hauptwerken und hat die Entwicklung der analytischen Philosophie nachhaltig geprägt.

[Ramzzi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Important, though not as epic as Russell's other books. Nevertheless, it has a lot of insights on philosophy, language, metaphysics, epistemology, or overall, analytic philosophy. Russell, of course, is funny as ever, especially the beginning part when he said he doesn't know where Wittgenstein is, if he is still alive or dead.

[Brian P · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is more about laying the foundation for how to do philosophical theory through logic than it is a book about philosophy. It does a good job of building up its principles even though it's sometimes tough to grasp that he's questioning literally everything we know. The introduction is too much too early and the final essay I didn't care for beyond a single line.

[Andrew Greatorex · Rating 3 out of 5]

A dense and insightful - though outdated - introduction to the relationship between language and knowledge.

[J. · Rating 5 out of 5]

My rating indicates the extraordinary use-value of the text for doing philosophy.

[Valeriano Diviacchi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book to read to understand the foundation beginnings of analytic philosophy.

[Lucas · Rating 3 out of 5]

A decent enough introduction to post-Fregean analytic philosophy, both its methods and the problems with which it is chiefly concerned

[Audiobook Heaven · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book, I listened to the audiobook version on YouTube. I will leave the link below so that everyone can enjoy it! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8fry...

[Nikhil Waiker · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good starting book for Atomism

[Leo Tao · Rating 2 out of 5]

I declare slop

Wittgenstein Supremacy

[Rahul Banerjee · Rating 3 out of 5]

A set of lectures by Russell himself where he introduces his philosophy of logical atomism, and also his theory of types, followed by a brief application of his ideas to metaphysics. A fairly readable book although a bit unnecessarily verbose at times.

[Ege · Rating 4 out of 5]

1) Önermeler sadece doğru veya yanlış olabilirken önerme fonksiyonları "zorunlu, olanaklı, olanaksız" olarak değerlendirilebilir. Mesela "x, x'dir" zorunlu bir önerme fonksiyonu iken "x, bir insandır" ise olanaklı bir önerme fonksiyonudur fakat eğer "x bir tek boynuzlu attır" olanaksız bir önerme fonksiyonudur(Niye?). "Bazı, bütün, her,..." gibi sözcükler bir önerme fonksiyonunun varlığına işaret eder.
Tekrar okumadan not: "Niye?" diye sormuşum. Bence bunun sebebi 'x bir tek boynuzlu attır' önermesini örnekleyecek bir x olmaması sebebidir adına 'önerme fonksiyonu' denmesi.


2)
1. Sokrates, bir insandır.
2. İnsanlar vardır.
3. O halde Sokrates vardır.

1. Sokrates, bir insandır.
2. İnsanlar çok sayıdadır(çok sayıda vardır).
3. O halde, Sokrates çok sayıdadır(çok sayıda vardır).

Varoluş, önerme fonksiyonunun ya da çıkarımsal olarak bir sınıfın yüklemidir, bir özelliğidir. Eğer "tek boynuzlu atlar vardır" derseniz, "Öyle bir x vardır ki, x tek boynuzlu attır." Önerme fonksiyonunun çok sayıda olduğunu söylemek o fonksiyonu sağlayan x'in birçok değeri olduğunu söylemiş oluruz. Aslında "İnsan, vardır" demek, "x'in İnsan olması olanaklıdır" demek ile aynı şeydir ve hiçbir şey ifade etmez.

3)
Socrates likes Plato
x likes Plato
x likes y
x R y
Note: I don't think this method of reduction is true because the verb "like" can't be defined simply. For example, what does mean "I like my mom", does that mean an effect of some chemical reactions in my brain or not effect of it but itself? We may think of it from the perspective of functionalism. Furthermore, if we think "like" is an effect of chemical reactions, different people may have different chemical reactions for different people which leads us to a definition-problem.

4) "Waverley'in yazarı" bir ad değil betimelemedir, sembollerden oluşur. Mesela "Scott" bir addır ve "Scott, Waverley'in yazarıdır." dersek bu şu anlama gelir, bir x kişisi vardır, bu kişinin adı Scott'tır ve Waverley'i yazmıştır. Bu cümlede "Scott" ve "Waverley'in yazarı" kelimelerini özleştirmek hatadır, mesela "Scott ölümlüdür." cümlesi ile "Scott" ve "ölümlü" kelimelerini de özleştiremeyiz.

5) "Fransa'nın şimdiki kralı kel değildir" önermesini reddetmek "Fransanın şimdiki kralı kel değildir" önermesini kabul etmek değildir. Bu önerme "Fransa'nın şimdiki kralı olan bir x vardır, ve x kel değildir." demektir, bunun reddi de "Ya Fransa'nın şimdiki kralı olan bir yoktur ya da x kel değildir." demektir.

[Kerem Cankocak · Rating 5 out of 5]

Russell kitabını şu sözlerle tanıtır: “Aşağıdaki [metin] 1918 yılının ilk aylarında Londra’da verdiğim, büyük çoğunluğunu arkadaşım ve eski öğrencim Ludwig Wittgenstein’dan öğrendiğim, belli fikirlerin açıklanmasıyla ilgili olan sekiz derslik bir kursun metnidir. 1914 Ağustosundan beri onun görüşlerini bilme fırsatına sahip değilim ve şu an yaşıyor olup olmadığını bile bilmiyorum. Bu yüzden, derslerde içerilen kuramların çoğuna önceden orijinal bir katkıda bulunmasının ötesinde, kendisinin bu derslerde söylenenlerde sorumluluğu yoktur.”
Mantıksal atom tam olarak nedir? Russell bize bunların tikeller, nitelikler ve ilişkiler olduğunu söylüyor. Dahası Russell bu söylediğini, açıkça, mantıksal bir açıdan baktığımızda gerçekliğin belirli niteliklere sahip ve birbirleriyle belirli ilişkiler içerisinde duran tikellere indirgenmiş bir biçimde göründüğü olgusuna dayandırmaktadır. En azından, gerçekliği genelde bu şekilde düşünür ve hakkında bu şekilde konuşuruz, dolayısıyla olması gereken de budur. Şayet gerçeklik, aslında bizim onu düşüncemizde ve konuşmamızda parçalarına ayırdığımız biçimde parçalara ayrılmıyorsa, onun hakkında düşündüğümüz ve konuştuğumuz her şey kökten yanlış demektir. Russell’ın savunduğu mantık, Hegel’i az ya da çok takip eden insanların monistik mantığına karşıt olmak suretiyle atomistiktir. Mantığının atomistik olduğunu söylerken, birçok ayrık şey olduğu yönündeki sağduyusal inancı paylaştığını ima eder; dünyanın görünen çokluğunun sadece tek bir bölünmez Gerçekliğin safhalarından ve gerçek olmayan bölümlerinden meydana geldiğini kabul etmez.
Russell’a göre mantık felsefedeki en temel alandır ve bütün felsefe okulları metafizikten çok mantıkla sınıflandırılmalılar. Kendi mantığına atomcu diyen Russell, bundan dolayı kendi felsefesini, en başa eklenecek kimi sıfatlar olsun ya da olmasın, “gerçekçilik” yerine “mantıksal atomculuk” olarak nitelemeyi tercih eder. Russell’ın atomcu mantığı, günümüzün “memetik” zihin felsefesiyle birleştiği çok yan var olduğu için güncelliğini korumaktadır.

[Haktan DÖĞEN · Rating 3 out of 5]

Russell’ın Mantıksal Atomculuk Felsefesi denen şeyi, “düşünceyi mantıksal lego parçalarına bölerek hakikati inşa etme” girişimi olarak görüp biraz gülümsememek elde değil. Bu yaklaşım, Heidegger’in dediği gibi, “varlığın anlamını” değil, varlıkla ilgili cümlelerin sentaksını konu edinmeyi tercih ediyor — yani ontolojiyi dilbilgisine indirgeme cüreti.

Russell’ın ontoloji anlayışı, “mantıksal atom” kavramına dayanıyor. Ancak bu kavram, fenomenolojik reduksiyonun yaptığı gibi bilincin yapısına inmiyor; tersine, bilinç ile dünya arasındaki ilişkisel derinliği, mantıksal bir eşleştirme problemine çeviriyor. Burada intentionalite (niyetlilik) kavramı, “temsil”e indirgenmiş durumda. Bu indirgeme, anlamın yaşantısal boyutunu —Husserl’in “yaşantı akışı” dediği şeyi— tamamen dışlıyor.

Bir de epistemolojik iddiası var: Doğru bilgi, dünyanın mantıksal yapısıyla birebir izomorfik olan önermelerden ibarettir. Bu, kıta geleneğinde “pozitivist naiflik” olarak okunur. Çünkü gerçeklik, sadece mantıksal biçimlerin doğruluk değerine indirgenecek kadar yeknesak değil; dilin şiirselliği, toplumsal yapılar, tarihsel kırılmalar ve varoluşsal deneyimler bu formüllerin dışına taşar.

Kısacası, Russell’ın mantıksal atomculuğu, hakikati bir mühendis gibi tasarlama çabası; oysa kıta felsefesi için hakikat, hermenötik bir keşif, tarihsel bir açılım ve varoluşsal bir deneyimdir.

[Othoob · Rating 2 out of 5]

I do not like this book. This book divorced language from reality. Concept? Throw them out. Concepts, according to Bertrand Russel (and most modern philosophers), have no relation to perceptions. The dichotomy of empiricism vs. rationalism still lives today, especially among the social sciences.

Russell’s analytical philosophy rests on floating abstractions. That words only reveal what is true or false in terms of its meaning، and not in accordance with reality.

For instance:
The word triangle by definition means geometrical shape that consists of three sides. You cannot detach the word from its meaning because it literally means three sides (saying, for instance, that triangle is a four-sided shape is a contradiction).
And so we can only say what is true or false analytically, and it is not knowable to us (to him, specifically) the world synthetically.

This book is divorced from reality, with no concepts and no integration and that is fundamentally (and reasonably) opposed to my convictions.