Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Notes for Thursday, March 30
Read to p. 321. The Analytic Tradition: Moore, Russell
G. E. Moore (1873-1958)
The annoying undergraduate. Skepticism, philosophy's legitimate son. Things are exactly as they seem. His refrain: "What exactly do you mean?" Truth, he held, is usually boring. But truth (and especially Truth) is not the goal of philosophy anyhow, but just the clarification of meaning. The revenge of common sense.
(Sir) Bertrand Russell (1872-1970!)
Great mathematical talent and penchant, meets Peano and Frege. Collaborates with Alfred North Whitehead to write Principia Mathematica in 1910-13. Russell champions Frege's idea that mathematics is an extension of the basic priniciples of logic. He develops a powerful symbolic logic. Philosophy is, in his view, subordinate to science. His own philosophy went through numerous changes. As an analytic philosopher, he felt the main function of philosophy was the clarification of vague terms like mind, matter, consciousness, knowledge, will, time, etc. The application of the question of existence to three problems (pp. 317-320). 1. The golden mountain, or unicorn problem. 2. Scott is the author of Waverly problem (which we can assimilate no doubt to Frege's Morning Star/Evening Star/Venus problem). 3. The present King of France problem. Russell believed he had solved these problems by a proposition central to his Theory of Descriptions, namely:
There is an entity C, such that the sentence "X is Y" is true if and only if X = C.
(C is an entity, Y is a characteristic written in the form of an adjective, and X is the subject of which the adjective is predicated, i.e. to which the adjective is attributed.) Existence has been neatly excised from (= cut out of) the proposition.
Russell's very active (and seemingly unrelated) life as a politically concerned citizen and sometime activist. Spent part of WWI in jail as a pacifist. Protested the presence of American atomic weapons in Britain. Opposed the Vietnam war when in his 90s!
G. E. Moore (1873-1958)
The annoying undergraduate. Skepticism, philosophy's legitimate son. Things are exactly as they seem. His refrain: "What exactly do you mean?" Truth, he held, is usually boring. But truth (and especially Truth) is not the goal of philosophy anyhow, but just the clarification of meaning. The revenge of common sense.
(Sir) Bertrand Russell (1872-1970!)
Great mathematical talent and penchant, meets Peano and Frege. Collaborates with Alfred North Whitehead to write Principia Mathematica in 1910-13. Russell champions Frege's idea that mathematics is an extension of the basic priniciples of logic. He develops a powerful symbolic logic. Philosophy is, in his view, subordinate to science. His own philosophy went through numerous changes. As an analytic philosopher, he felt the main function of philosophy was the clarification of vague terms like mind, matter, consciousness, knowledge, will, time, etc. The application of the question of existence to three problems (pp. 317-320). 1. The golden mountain, or unicorn problem. 2. Scott is the author of Waverly problem (which we can assimilate no doubt to Frege's Morning Star/Evening Star/Venus problem). 3. The present King of France problem. Russell believed he had solved these problems by a proposition central to his Theory of Descriptions, namely:
There is an entity C, such that the sentence "X is Y" is true if and only if X = C.
(C is an entity, Y is a characteristic written in the form of an adjective, and X is the subject of which the adjective is predicated, i.e. to which the adjective is attributed.) Existence has been neatly excised from (= cut out of) the proposition.
Russell's very active (and seemingly unrelated) life as a politically concerned citizen and sometime activist. Spent part of WWI in jail as a pacifist. Protested the presence of American atomic weapons in Britain. Opposed the Vietnam war when in his 90s!
# posted by Michael @ 6:15 AM 
