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What people get wrong about Bertrand Russell

• Chinjut 7y ago
  Minor correction: Gödel's incompleteness theorem dates to 1931, not 1944. That said, I agree that the later Russell's more popular writing has been given short shrift, and stands the test of time in many ways better than the earlier Russell's logicism.
  • weinzierl 7y ago
    That is true, Gödel's incompleteness theorem dates to 1931. In 1944 Gödel published his first philosophical paper, entitled "On Russell's Mathematical Logic". The mistake was probably made because the author Julian Baggini is a philosopher and so he is mostly aware of Gödel's philosophical works and not so much of his mathematical accomplishments.
• empath75 7y ago
  The Principia Mathematica was surely one of the most useful wrong-turns in history.
• wry_discontent 7y ago
  If you're interested in Russell, or mathematics in general, I can't recommend the graphic novel Logicomix highly enough. It's about Russell and the Principia Mathematica
  • anaphor 7y ago
    Also his autobiography is pretty readable and worth reading if you want to know more about his personal life.
  • sorokod 7y ago
    Christos Papadimitriou is one of the two authors.
  • idoubtit 7y ago
    As a former mathematician, I totally disagree. Logicomix has nearly no mathematical content. The most technical part is a quick description of Hilbert's Hotel, but I thought it was very shallow, since there was no explanation. It did not even try to define infinity, or suggest how to distinguish several kinds of infinity. And, at least in the French edition, the Barber Paradox is wrongly stated! Logicomix is mostly about people, especially Russell, with the postulate that everyone that worked on the foundations of logic was insane. But if you scrutinize the story, many details are wrong (IIRC, the young years of Russel, Frege's aggressive bursts, the last years of Cantor, …). They bent the reality to obtain the cliché that most people expected: genius mathematicians are mad.
    • anaphor 7y ago
      I agree, the graphic novel was entertaining, but not an accurate portrayal of their lives. If you're looking for something more factual, then Russell's own autobiography is a good place to start. Also "The Cambridge Companion to Bertrand Russell" (edited by Nicholas Griffin) is a source I can vouch for. https://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Companion-Bertrand-Companions-Philosophy/dp/0521636345 https://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Companion-Bertrand-Companio...
    • bananamerica 7y ago
      I don't think teaching math was the goal of Logicomix at all.
    • weinzierl 7y ago
      It has little mathematical content and as anaphor pointed out in a sibling comment is is not even an accurate portrayal of Russel's and his contemporaries lives. I think trained mathematicians and the philosophically educated are probably just not the right target audience for the book. I still found it an interesting and entertaining read. Just a few days ago I gave it to my eight year old and she came up with a lot of good questions while reading it. It is not a children's comic though and it is definitely a book that needs guidance, especially because of the artistic liberty it takes in many respects. For example, the first thing I had to set straight is that Russel's brother was nothing like he was portrayed in the book.
• anaphor 7y ago
  As someone who took a few university courses on analytic philosophy covering Russell, I've never heard anyone suggest he "sold out". Maybe that's just people who aren't really familiar with Russell or his personal life that say that? If you're going to argue that he wrote sellout books, then he did that long before he gave up on logicism. See for example Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, which is aimed at people who know nothing above regular public school math. I think the ability to recognize that he had basically hit a dead end with logicism was probably his greatest success, instead of falling prey to a sunk-cost fallacy. The guy wrote one of the most influential papers in philosophy of the 20th century ("On Denoting"), as well as being one of the central figures in the founding of an entire field of study, but he knew when to call it quits, and I doubt he regretted it at all. His social and political writings and activism are a treasure trove of wisdom IMHO. Edit: if I'm being fair though, it is pretty common for people to say History of Western Philosophy was a bit of a poor work that he did just because it would sell well. That is just one book out of hundreds of works though, and honestly it's not that bad if you balance it with more neutral sources on some of the material.
  • ChrisSD 7y ago
    I don't think History of Western Philosophy is bad but it is opinionated. If someone were expecting either a dispassionate overview or heartfelt enthusiasm for all philosophers past I can see how they'd come away disappointed. Especially when he's particularly dismissive. If you go in expecting Russell's view of Western philosophy through the ages then you'll get just that.
    • fanzhang 7y ago
      I thought Russell's History of Western Philosophy was interesting precisely because it gave Russell's personal view on all the philosophers. (This is just like Kenneth Clark's Civilisation.) There are already dozens of dry textbooks out there, whereas Russell was uniquely positioned to write an entertaining opinion piece on the topic.
      • ubermon 7y ago
• musicale 7y ago
  I never thought that Godel incompleteness of a logical system was particularly damaging; the ability to make self-referential statements is useful, the ability to resolve self-referential paradoxes less so. Same for the halting problem in CS, which is typically resolved by (sleep 9999; kill -9 $pid). QED. ;-)
  • evanb 7y ago
    Russell's hope was to establish that one could find proof of all true mathematical statements, so that one needed a fixed-for-all-time set of axioms and nothing more. Incompleteness obviously destroys that hope.
  • drchewbacca 7y ago
    There is an interesting, if quite technical, answer here about Goodstein's Theorem which is a very reasonable number theory theorem which cannot be proven in first order logic. So questions around statements which are true but not provable in certain logical systems do have concrete examples and are interesting imo. https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/625223/do-we-know-if-there-exist-true-mathematical-statements-that-can-not-be-proven/625404 https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/625223/do-we-know-i...
    • zajio1am 7y ago
      Goodstein's Theorem cannot be proved in Peano axiomatization of natural numbers in first order logic. You can have stronger axiomatization of natural numbers in first order logic that allows to prove Goodstein's Theorem - such axiomatization would contain subset of set theory and transfinite induction up to ordinal e_0. But it is still axiomatixation in first order logic.
    • 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
      As mentioned in that answer, these "natural independence phenomena" do seem much more interesting than Gödel's incompleteness results.
  • scotty79 7y ago
    My thoughts exactly. Goedel is just basically "set of all sets that don't contain themselves ... does it contain itself or not?" applied to 'provability'. It gives you no more profound insight than "you can eff yourself with recursion if you aren't super careful" which is obvious for any beginner programmer who encounters recursion and tries to write whatever he likes in recursive function. I guess this might have been surprise for mathematicians who always thought they have all infinites at their disposal and thus are completely unrestricted and brushed self-referential paradoxes under the rug as curiosities until Godel showed they can be constructed about things mathematicians care about like provability. I believe you can make a consistent fully provable axiomatic system by excluding statements that are not provable from your system, as meaningless. You don't consider whether "number 5 contains itself" is true because it's nonsensical. "This statement is unprovable" can be considered similarily nonsensical not because it wrongly combines math concepts but because it's a self-referential paradox and we choose to not allow that.
• Ericson2314 7y ago
  No applied logic is useful, but you need computers because the proof is big. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automath https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automath gets started just around the time he dies, so Russel still made the right call, but lets not sacrifice a good idea "cause Gödel" for all eternity to prop him back up.
• amarte 7y ago
  As a side note since this discussion is related to Russell and his brilliant contributions, I think a similar discussion can be had regarding Russell's contemporary and co-author Alfred North Whitehead (mentioned breifly in the article). If Russell can be charged with "selling out" or directing his work toward a more general audience, Whitehead can be accused of the opposite, or perhaps even worse. If you read into his works post Principia (which he co-authored with Russell) you find a brilliant logician and philosopher begin to deviate from commonly held assumptions of Western thought and attempt to articulate a philosophy often at odds with "objective" ways of thinking. His works are interesting yet difficult because he is often so at odds with 20th century science and philosophy that he has to create his own terms to describe phenomena, which he builds upon with increasingly unfamiliar terminology until most readers feel completely alienated and give up. Imo both Russell and Whitehead were great minds and deserve their fair share of consideration and contemplation, pre- and post- Principia.
  • lordgrenville 7y ago
    Apropos AN Whitehead, I listened to an interesting talk the other week [1] about "process philosophy", specifically in phil of biology. The speaker (John Dupré) thought that he was working along the same lines as Whitehead, but that he was a poor writer so no-one can really be sure if they understood him. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhczxmLkGHI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhczxmLkGHI
• dr_dshiv 7y ago
  >Arguably Russell saw the limitations of “technical philosophy” more clearly than those who thought of themselves as following in his footsteps. The analytic tradition has produced some great work but too many of its practitioners have conflated rigour with technical argument. I would wager that there is not a single major work of political or moral philosophy which depends on a formal logical proof. What endures of Russell’s logic is of interest only in logic. If Russell wanted to address the problems of real life, he had to leave behind the symbols and numbers that had so captivated him in his youth. What are the shortcomings of logic? Just incompleteness, or is there more?
  • antupis 7y ago
    Might be horrible books with good theory see John Rawls Theory of Justice
  • pure-awesome 7y ago
    I'd say the major shortcoming of logic is its inability to express uncertainty. It's well-suited for mathematical proof as practiced, where axioms and definitions are precisely defined, and there is no reliance on empirical observation with potentially noisy data. However, most of real-life is not as clear-cut. Deriving the truth of a statement may depend on multiple potentially faulty pieces of evidence which must be taken into account together. For this, one needs to assign probabilities. This is useful even when applied back to mathematics. In practice, mathematicians form conjectures "likely to be true" long before they are formally proven. Additionally, they must narrow the search space in their minds in order to try the most likely avenues of proof, a process we refer to as "creativity". Even using probability is only one more step towards solving the question of formally codifying general reasoning. We must also consider factors such as use of language and forming concepts (what precisely IS a "chair", after all?), and further aspects which form a basis for human action and which cannot be logically derived, namely our morality and base goals. Not to mention the entire plethora of such questions with which the field of philosophy concerns itself. (These are the types of questions to which we will need to find some answer if we are ever to construct a useful generally reasoning AI) Much as classical Newtonian mechanics is a useful approximation of physics at large scales and low speeds, formal logic is a useful approximation of reasoning at high certainty and low flexibility of interpretation.
• wadkar 7y ago
  I was halfway through the third or fourth paragraph and thoroughly confused which Russel is the author talking about. I don’t understand why the author mentions the first Russel if the article isn’t (mainly) about a comparison between the two. It confused me so I’ll ask the obvious question: this article is about the second Russel who wrote Why I am not a Christian, right?
  • eatplayrove 7y ago
    I don't know if this is what you are actually asking but it reads like that. There are no two Russells, it's the same person, just different kind of works in different periods of his life.
    • wadkar 7y ago
      > There are no two Russells What? Okay, I really didn’t realize that it’s just one Russel. I mean if you read the first paragraph and don’t have background in philosophy you would assume there were two persons named Russel after reading the first paragraph! I mean author says the first Russell was short lived and gives yearX-yearY. So yeah, I thought the first Russell died in yearY!! I feel stupid now :-/
• moomin 7y ago
  I highly recommend The History of Western Philosphy precisely because it’s highly opinionated. It’s got many things to like, including being frank about not knowing the answers, and treating figures such as Augustine and Aquinas as philosophers in their historical context. A very engaging book.
  • jhanschoo 7y ago
    If you are looking for a proper introduction to western philosophy and a history of ideas, I recommend instead Antony Kenny's A New History of Western Philosophy, which academics think is an excellent introduction.
• mikojan 7y ago
  > But although it is true that Russell’s political writings were often > naive and simplistic, ... Say what? Of all the books on politics I've read in my youth Russell's were some of best. Not simplistic but written in a clear language. Not naive but stemming from the rich classical liberal and socialist tradition of the likes of Wilhelm von Humboldt and John Stuart Mill. A tradition that has been completely erased from the history books in the last decades (which ought to make his political works all the more interesting). (I fully accept the possibility that I am in fact naive and simple-minded, of course. :D)