display all the ideas for this combination of philosophers
5 ideas
| 5361 | Philosophers must get used to absurdities [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Whoever wishes to become a philosopher must learn not to be frightened by absurdities. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Problems of Philosophy [1912], Ch. 2) | |
| A reaction: He says this jokingly, but it is obviously true. Philosophy requires extreme imagination, and it also requires taking seriously possibilities that are dismissed by others. It would be a catastrophe if we all dismissed the truth as self-evidently false. |
| 5368 | Philosophy verifies that our hierarchy of instinctive beliefs is harmonious and consistent [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Philosophy should show us the hierarchy of our instinctive beliefs, ..and show that they do not clash, but form a harmonious system. There is no reason to reject an instinctive belief, except that it clashes with others. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Problems of Philosophy [1912], Ch. 2) | |
| A reaction: This is open to the standard objections to the coherence theory of truth (as explained by Russell!), but I like this view of philosophy. Somewhere behind it is the rationalist dream that the final set of totally consistent beliefs will have to be true. |
| 23025 | Philosophers should be more inductive, and test results by their conclusions, not their self-evidence [Russell] |
| Full Idea: The progress of philosophy seems to demand that, like science, it should learn to practise induction, to test its premisses by the conclusions to which they lead, and not merely by their apparent self-evidence. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Explanations in reply to Mr Bradley [1899], nr end) | |
| A reaction: [from Twitter] Love this. It is 'one person's modus ponens is another person's modus tollens'. I think all philosophical conclusions, without exception, should be reached by evaluating the final result fully, and not just following a line of argument. |
| 17641 | Discoveries in mathematics can challenge philosophy, and offer it a new foundation [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Any new discovery as to mathematical method and principles is likely to upset a great deal of otherwise plausible philosophising, as well as to suggest a new philosophy which will be solid in proportion as its foundations in mathematics are securely laid. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Regressive Method for Premises in Mathematics [1907], p.283) | |
| A reaction: This is a manifesto for modern analytic philosophy. I'm not convinced, especially if a fictionalist view of maths is plausible. What Russell wants is rigour, but there are other ways of getting that. Currently I favour artificial intelligence. |
| 21572 | Philosophical disputes are mostly hopeless, because philosophers don't understand each other [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Explicit controversy is almost always fruitless in philosophy, owing to the fact that no two philosophers ever understand one another. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Our Knowledge of the External World [1914], 1) | |
| A reaction: Contemporaries don't even seem to read one another very much, especially these days, when there are thousands of professional philosophers. (If you are a professional, have you read all the works written by your colleagues and friends?) |