On Mar 10, 2009, at 7:02 PM, [email protected] wrote:
What's the big thing about Russell?
Here's my admittedly non-expert take on it: Russell did to philosophy
(analytical philosophy) what he did to mathematics. He added rigour,
gave it a language, built it from the ground up (without question
building on the work of Dedekind, Cantor, others: most important of
whom Frege), as also offering important ideas/methods such as the
theory of descriptions: see Quine's great essay "On What There Is" (http://ereserve.lib.utah.edu/ereserve/trms/annual/PHIL/6040/Haanstad/what.pdf
).
At the same time, he was wise enough to entertain and encourage
someone like Wittgenstein, finding in the midst of all that speaking
in tongues and sometimes seemingly ludicrous statements, the signs of
a genius.
Add to that his [un]timely fight against religion, conservative social
mores, psychologism, and everything else under the sun that was wrong
about the 20th century.
But most of all, what is beautiful about Russell's thought is that he
worried about the foundational problems and attempted to solve them
using careful, rigourous devices. Russell, to me, closed the footnotes
to Plato, and returned philosophy to the people.
--ravi
--
Support something better than yourself ;-)
PeTA => http://peta.org/
Greenpeace => http://greenpeace.org/
If you have nothing better to read: http://platosbeard.org/
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