Russell's abandonment of Leibniz's platonism after his conversion to the cult of materialism.
Three related definitions of consciousness not possible in materialism or analytic philosophy: 1. Consciousness is experience by the first person singular. 2. Consciousness is self-referential awareness. 3. Consciousness is the acquisition of knowledge by acquaintance. Ironically, the third definition is similar to one of the two forms of knowledge originally proposed by Bertrand Russell, one of the founders of analytic philosophy, which he called "knowledge by acquaintance" the other being "knowledge by description". Knowledge by description is that you know from common knowledge that Obama is president of the United States, while knowledge by acquaintance means that you have met Obama, presumably in the White House. Analytic philosophy deals only with knowledge by description, omitting knowledge by acquaintance, despite Russell's awareness of this type knowledge, so that Russell's omission of knowledge by acquaintance in the philosophy of materialism-- a necessity-- was a deliberate omission from analytic philosophy, no doubt due to Russell's conversion to the semi-religious cult of materialism. This seems to have occurred during the young Russell's writing of "The Philosophy of Leibniz", which expertly treats Leibniz's logic, but begins to pull back as he approaches Leibniz's Platonism. which Russell does not seem to have understood very much, much less accepted. Russell then publicly promoted materialism and analytic philosophy, together with the third member of their dark trinity, atheism. The rest is history, as they say, in which this trinity became de rigeour in the halls of "official" western academe. Meanwhile because of this dark trinity, western philosophy has struggled but failed to explain consciousness. Dr. Roger B Clough NIST (ret.) [1/1/2000] See my Leibniz site at http://independent.academia.edu/RogerClough --- This email is free from viruses and malware because avast! Antivirus protection is active. http://www.avast.com -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
