/lit/ - Literature

>>23462497
Not to mention he was also a libtard

>>23462497
he founded analytic philosophy dipshit

>>23462497
Definitely wasn't a fraud. I get it though OP, if you are looking for the guy that wrote hundreds of tomes of absolute unrefutable truth and who was never wrong about anything then you will be looking for the rest of your life.

>>23462540
>who was never wrong about anything
He was BTFO by Witty and was traumatized for life.

>>23462497
The Principia was totally unnecessary because the axioms of mathematics are definitionally true. They are tautologies by definition and don't need verification or proof. It was a totally pointless exercise to axiomatize things that are already axioms.
His 'History of Western Philosophy' is a poor book and Russell was surprised by it success. The courts ruled that he couldn't teach at university because of his views on sexual behavior (Kay v. Board of Higher Education) so he taught introductory philosophy as an adult education class. The book is poor because of its superficial treatment of various philosophers, mischaracterization of their views (especially Scohpenhauer), and its lack of seriousness. It has probably had the effect of turning off a lot of people from philosophy because many believe the book to be an acceptable introductory text to philosophy, given its popularity.
His best work is probably 'My Philosophical Development' or 'Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits'. The former wasn't published until Russell was 87. The latter is Russell finally accepting that Kant's central doctrines about total reality and the bounds of human experience are correct. Anyone who still considers themselves an empiricist could probably benefit from reading these last two. There's value in seeing someone of high intelligence be totally intellectually honest about his failure to make empiricism work after trying to do so for more than half a century.

>>23462545
If Wittgenstein did a BTFO then this is the face that is burned into the mind of the one who was BTFO'ed.

>>23462554
Forgot to mention he wrote 'History of Western Philosophy' for that adult education class.

>>23462497
He was definitely not a fraud.

>>23462497
He was definitely a fraud.

>>23462497
He might have been a fraud

>>23462497
I've never read him, but I don't think a person's work being wrong should be necessarily used against them. Wasn't Newton's understanding of gravity faulty? Sometimes a person's work can be wrong but it can lead to insights in the right direction. And I doubt everything he said in that book is wrong.
As for the wikipedia book, well, gathering information at the time must've been a lot harder than now where everything is just a few clicks away. Not to mention, for someone to write on the history of something, they need to know it and understand it first, no?

>>23462662
Science =/= philosophy.

A philosopher's work should absolutely be used against them.

>>23462497
>>23462554
Try reading literally anything about the philosophy of mathematics

>>23462662
>>23462497
The PM was not “wrong” ffs

>>23462676
Try making an actual argument.

>>23462497
This guy was Reddit incarnate 70 years avant la lettre

>>23462527
So? Anal philosophy is worthless. So are the continentals but that's a different story.

>>23462497
Definitely. All atheists are retarded. It can't be helped.

>>23462666
Science is a branch of philosophy just like all other fields.

>>23462497
People don't remember him because of his philosophical or mathematical contributions but because he went out of his way to popularize himself and his brand of champagne socialist politics. He was basically a talking head.

>>23462997
No it's applied math

>>23462698
dude, I read literally one paper about the PM and can easily tell from your posts that you don't even know the most basic shit. There is no point in making arguments against someone THIS illiterate.

>>23463016
Didn't he suck up to the kween pretty hard

>>23462497
I don't care about philosophy or math.

>>23462680
I wouldn't know desu ^^'
>>23462666
What does that mean? It's a math book. Is math not science and philosophy instead? But even then how would you judge if a philosophy is correct? And what is so bad about making "wrong" philosophy?

>>23463240
Science is philosophy. Every academic subject is philosophy. Math is also philosophy. Everything in academia spawned from philosophy and has a philosophical set of assumptions that underpin it.
A philosophy is correct if you agree with it and incorrect if you don't

>>23463249
>Every academic subject is philosophy.
Agreed.
Okay, so next step i guess is why his work should be used against him? why is an attempt not enough?

>>23463261
It's fine, I'm not a fan of Russell because I think he was wrong and he also had a very condescending and anti-human outlook. Russell literally wrote that most of humanity would need to have their behaviors managed through a series of interventions and "injections," aka vaccines and drugs, for their own good as the future unfolded. Anyone who feels that way about people is not someone I have much respect for, because it's a clear sign of misanthropy.
His actual philosophical contributions that he's known for, I agree with this anon
>>23462554
A lot of it was much ado about nothing. Pointing out that mathematical axioms are tautologies isn't interesting unless you connect it back to metaphysics, aka, unless you're using it to show how everything we think of as "truth" and "knowledge" is corrupted by the artificial nature of language. Russell was too stodgy to make that sort of hallucinogenic leap, so I've never been a fan.
As for what's objectively wrong with writing something down, nothing, but that doesn't mean I or others have to see it as insightful if we don't think it is.

>>23463240
The problem with your mentality on this is one in which you are admitting that you do not know, but you are also conceding to the point Russell/Whitehead spent over a decade making, while likely trying to assert that the attempt was wrong in the entirety somehow based on post-publication material. So at this point you need to clarify what your actual point is, for instance, if you just want to complain about Bertrand Russell then you will find no shortage of complaint enthusiasts here, but you are not really making a point. If you want to say the Prinicipia was a bloated book in it's original form and the subsequent 2 publications of it took into account the prevailing criticisms of the time and were made more simple then that is fine. If you want to say Russell/Whitehead made an assumption of completeness and this was determined to be wrong afterwards then that is fine as well, if you can somehow link this to the work being wrong in the entirety then you are more than welcome to make the attempt and in the process demonstrate you misunderstood the development that led to this. I am inclined to say you just want to complain or are attempting to be spoon fed a book that no one here is likely to cooperate in trying to spoon feed to you, and if you attempt to read the Prinicipia you will find out why no one is likely to be interested in this.

>>23462497
>Advanced mathematics significantly
>Won a Nobel Prize
>BTFO Christians to such an extent they still seethe today
I'm going to say mega based

>>23462497
I was surprised to see that his history of philosophy is more like the opposite of Wikipedia: not much structure, systematics, little analytic autism, more like a conversational stream of thoughts. Like in the chapter on Nietzsche, there is no attempt to give an overview or to differ between phases, it reads more like a monologue blurted out. Then I read that Russell hated rewriting, and basically just wrote things in one go, and it seems to make sense.

>>23463182
Maths is a branch of philosophy just like all other fields.

>>23462497
Not really a fraud, but he's like a living crystallization of the Platonic idea of a cucked starched collar plaid jacket pencil-necked politics-adjusted toothless "expert" with several hundred pages of lukewarm and safe opinions on everything ever.

>>23464382
His opinions weren't safe in his time.

Is this book worth reading?

>>23464388
His opinions were entirely safe in his time for the people of his class and standing.

>>23464406
He was fired and went to prison. Not the worst things that can happen but most professors don't experience that.

>>23462554
Based.

Yes, to a certain extent. Most people are unaware that this man, who was once the most outspoken and influentialpacifist, endorsed the idea that the Soviet Union should be given the choice to either liberate Eastern Europe or face extinction at the hands of Western nuclear weapons.

In addition, this purported defender of the disadvantaged had the habit of disregarding anyone who did not address him by the name Sir Bertrand ("do so now, or feel the wrath of my intellect").
Paul Johnson, in his book Intellectuals, exposes the many flaws inBR's character.

>>23464049
Don't forget his Keep Australia White comments

>>23464974
Racial homogeneity is correlated with high levels of public trust. Multi-ethnic societies are failures. As a value, people should be treated equally, in practicality, countries should be one ethnicity.

>>23462497
How was his math book wrong? It wasn’t wrong at all

>>23464401
Yes it’s very good

>>23465985
Indeed.

>>23464538
All well deserved. Should've been executed as well for poisoning human thought with his libtardism.

What do you guys think of his paper on descriptivist naming, “On Denoting”?

https://www.uvm.edu/~lderosse/courses/lang/Russell(1905).pdf

>>23466141
It is worth the read, but removing the Analytic flavor from it tends to make it an exposition on reductio ad absurdem, which some of Russell's critics made known. The Meinong commentary actually has some pretty deep logic roots in some Marxist dialectics but I am sure if one looked hard enough they could find earlier instantiations. What Russell termed 'denoting phrases' have long been breach points in traditional languages and the use of more sophisticated Analytic style logic languages does mitigate this, so in this regard I will commend Russell.

>>23462554
Axioms are assumed to be true in the context of the relevant formal system. This does not mean that they are necessarily true statements about the part of reality which was intended to be captured by the system.

>"It was a totally pointless exercise to axiomatize things that are already axioms."

It was not pointless since he (and others) wanted to be assured that those axioms were consistent with reality.

>>23462787
(You)

>>23462787
/thread

>>23462497
Very often I hear /lit/ pseuds (you could say they are frauds...) parrot the libel that Russell was a "positivist" and anti-metaphysics. Not only is this false given Russell's extensive work in metaphysics, and even the statement of historians of philosophy who report on Russell like Frederick Copleston (who is rightly well-regarded by everybody ever), but I decided to start reading Russell's history of philosophy to see how bad it gets, and found this on p. 38. Judge for yourselfs.
>As to the nature and structure of the world, various hypotheses are possible. Progress in metaphysics, so far as it has existed, has consisted in a gradual refinement of all these hypotheses, a development of their implications, and a reformulation of each to meet the objections urged by adherents of rival hypotheses. To learn to conceive of the universe according to each of these systems is an imaginative delight and an antidote to dogmatism. Moreover, even if no one of the hypotheses can be demonstrated, there is genuine knowledge in the discovery of what is involved in making each of them consistent with itself and with known facts.
Russell is here not only positively affirming that metaphysics progresses over time, and identifying how this can be defined in a non-controversial manner, but he is praising it as delightful, and perfectly capable of being consistent with what we otherwise accept as fact. This is not the way a positivist talks about metaphysics, just so /lit/ knows. Elsewhere already in this history, I found him being balanced in his appraisal of passion and intensity of feeling as compare with reason. Not only does he just like Nietzsche trace the two to the Greeks' balance of Olympianism with Dionysian mysteries, but he says that reason alone is dry and boring, and that though intensity of feeling can have excess, it is very important, especially for philosophy. He values both. Why does /lit/ act like he was a bugman who hates passion then? As you see, when you guys don't actually read, you become the frauds. Just go and read, it's not even that hard to do research before spouting inaccurate falsehoods off your armchair.
>>23462554
You misunderstand his project, it was to show that we can reduce arithmetic to a theory of types (comparable to but not the same as set theory). Unlike sets, types are syntactically of different sorts. Think of types as being like grammatical-metaphysical categories. Can we use them to then give a reduction of the axioms of arithmetic itself? This was the Russell-Whitehead project in the Principia. They weren't trying to axiomatize mathematics, they were on a further metaphysical project trying to reduce even those axioms to something deeper and more metaphysically fundamental. Frankly outside of the logicists (Frege, Russell/Whitehead, others) nobody has carried out a good metaphysical reduction of mathematics to something more fundamental than it, though some have shown interest and tried (Plato/Kant/Hegel).

>>23462527
You’re thinking of Frege

>>23462556
Doolittle would hate that

>>23466776
Probably because he's plainly a logical positivist who thinks the vast history of Metaphysics is nonsense, and where he's interested in the subject is a narrow set of topics. Dampening those facts by quoting a single passage speaking positively about Metaphysics in contrast with what he actually says about the Metaphysical speculations of everyone else in his History, and trying to excessively emphasize passion for Russell, when so many of his criticisms of other philosophers are for being failures at logic and too passionate by his arbitrary and flippant estimation won't change these facts.

>>23468680
He's not a logical positivist, nor anti-metaphysics. Someone gives an example that falsifies those claims clearly and cites other examples, even testimonies of trustworthy third parties like Frederick Copleston, and you will insist on the charge. Out of what? You need to realize you're just tilting at windmills.

>>23462497
>>23462526
>dad was a cuck with a bull plowing his wife
>rejects God
>gets cucked
how can anybody take this dude’s philosophy seriously?

>>23469147
>He subsequently divorced Dora and married 20 year old Patricia Spence while he was 58 years old
Sounds more like a chad with full context.

>>23468874
You gave no example that falsified my claims, and I spent several years studying Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, and Ayers to see if they were right, and Russell's positions, especially as can be inferred by his criticisms of the philosophers in his History, are firmly those of a logical positivist who's only fine with metaphysics as long as it doesn't resemble most metaphysics through history in favor of a neutered sorta Platonism. Russell is a fraud who can't even be assed to remember what the Idealism of Bradley that he used to accept amounted to for his excruciating Hegel chapter. "He's not a positivist!" Then you don't know what positivism, let alone his brand of logical positivism, is.

>>23469272
I have also spent years studying the same figures, and Bradley too, and Hegel as well, and positivists like Schlick and Carnap, and metaphysics through history, and what historians of philosophy have to say, and other secondary sources too. The difference between us is this: everyone who has studied these figures far more than either of us have will agree, in great chorus, including Russell himself and (to repeat a third time) figures like Copleston, that Russell was not a logical positivist and not anti-metaphysics. It's your word against all of theirs. I don't think you've got a leg to stand on even if you want to pretend to it.

>>23469341
Then spend more years studying because you don't know what either positivism and logical positivism are enough to identify those positions in Russell's criticisms in his garbage History. Second, I didn't argue he was anti-metaphysical tout court, I said he's taken that way because his attitude towards most Metaphysics is regard it as trash up and down exceot for the small bits he likes, which you would inflate into an excitement over subjects the History book we're talking about shits on.

Your characterizations are as disingenuous as Russell's own. He's a fraud and a hack as an historian of philosophy, with the notable exception of Leibniz, who he has a masterful grasp of. But that grasp isn't there when his main complaint among the philosophers is that they didn't think logic was a central as he imagined, nor is it present when he bitches about their political philosophy while insinuating that political philosophy isn't actually philosophy anyway, nor is it present for his chapters on Hegel, who he can't even bother to try to describe without drifting into flippant witticisms to fill space to get to the next chapter, nor is it in his dumb lazy discussion of Nietzsche, where he can't even catch the the whip comment re: women is said in Zarathustra by a woman ti Zarathustra. A lazy, sloppy, smug, moralizing, fraud, who's very good at math.

>>23469225
> ow he’s a cuck and a hypocrite

I've never read Bertrand Russel. I only know him for this quote (pic related.) But it's probably my favourite quote and it's something that I absolutely live by because the truth of it seems so obvious to me and yet a lot of people will want to deny (you) that fact.

>>23469410
I can't take your poor gaslighting attempt seriously when it immediately devolves into throwing insults and there's still zero engagement with the fact all historians would refuse to call him a logical positivist. Yeah you can try to posture over anons on this site and think you've got them beat but at the end of the day you're only fooling yourself.

>>23469272

>>23469522
>Tries to do what is best for the kids
>Wife is such a turbo cunt it's impossible
>Finally cut her loose and marries the kids' governess
Again, chad behavior

>>23462527
OP already mentioned him being a cringeworthy failure. You don't have to repeat that point.

>>23462540
>if you are looking for the guy that wrote hundreds of tomes of absolute unrefutable truth and who was never wrong about anything ...
... then you're looking for a math textbook.

>>23462676
Why? It's mostly midwitted bullshit. Platonism won. Simple as.

>>23462997
*Philosophy is a branch of science.

Fixed that for you.

>>23463249
>Every academic subject is philosophy.
Lmao, philosocucks have to resort to intellectual property theft because their own field was too fruitless.

>>23464240
Math has always been the polar opposite of philosophy. Math proves its claims whereas philosophy just expects you to believe its bullshit based on subjective faith. Math produces valuable tools for our understanding of the world while philosophy in its entire history never answered any relevant question. It has always been like this. Even in ancient Greece we had geniuses like Euclid and Archimedes on the one hand advancing humanity with math, and Plato and Aristotle on the other hand talking baseless bullshit of no value other than creating the illusion of pseudointellectualism in their readers.

>>23464401
No, it's garbage.

>>23469272
>>23469341
You guys spent several years studying things that can be read on wikipedia in 30 minutes?

There is something inherently pathetic about how failed academics in the field of Hard Science like Mathematics, Physics and some even in Medicine then try and make a name for themselves in Philosophy.

>>23469410
Eh, the only good part of the book is his treatment of Nietzsche, but that's more of a testament to just how lousy a thinker Nietzsche was than anything else.

>>23462584
>>23462589
>>23462649
The triality of man.

>>23469707
It's a defence of laziness. Grow up.

>>23462497

Anglo "Philosophy":

>Newton: famous for prostrating thinking before reality. An unprecedented disgrace.
>Hobbes: famous for prostrating thinking before Politics, i.e. the father of the Joe Rogan podcast.
>Hume: famous for affirming Occasionalism, a bog-standard idea across the ages and continents, both before and after him. This was considered revolutionary and scandalous by other Anglos.
>Berkeley: famous for affirming...perception? Anglos only accepted, begrudgingly, mind you, the foundation of Philosophy in general in the EIGHTEENTH century!
>Adam Smith: famous for believing that the Economy is real. Not even Marx himself was so naive, or vulgar.
>Bertrand Russell: famous for being a cretin. An international embarrassment.
>Whitehead: famous for starting so-called "French Postmodernism".
>Crowley: famous for getting fucked in the ass.
>Land: famous for jerking off to femboys.
>Eriugena: a grotesque pastiche most likely fabricated in the 20th century to redeem all of the above. It did not work.

>>23470464
Hehehe, you might be interested in Imre Lakatos. The Busemann-Petty problem is also a noteworthy consideration to take into account as well.

>>23470479
You're almost there

>>23470479
Your mind is very vulgar.

>>23470745
Hume was Scottish and Berkeley was Irish so they don't count. Eriugena was welsh not irish as is often believed

>>23462497
His comparison of Plato's dismally artless Republic to Sparta is weirdly accurate, and delightfully dismissive in tone. For sure Russell didn't have a spectacular sense of fantasy, but he was a genius at telling that apart from ordinary, boring madness.

>>23462497
>Nevertheless there is a great deal in him that must be dismissed as merely megalomaniac. Speaking of Spinoza he says: “How much of personal timidity and vulnerability does this masquerade of a sickly recluse betray!” Exactly the same may be said of him, with the less reluctance since he has not hesitated to say it of Spinoza. It is obvious that in his day-dreams he is a warrior, not a professor; all the men he admires were military. His opinion of women, like every man’s, is an objectification of his own emotion towards them, which is obviously one of fear. “Forget not thy whip”—but nine women out of ten would get the whip away from him, and he knew it, so he kept away from women, and soothed his wounded vanity with unkind remarks.

Nietzsche sisters... how do we respond to this?

>>23472691
Damn, that was an ice-cold takedown.

>>23472711
Russell always struck me as the kind of guy who looks harmless but could absolutely vaporize you if he wanted.

>>23462497
yeah it's called nepotism bro
same reason there's so many jews among the so-called important intellectuals
this guy was an aristocrat

>>23471901
>His comparison of Plato's dismally artless Republic to Sparta is weirdly accurate, and delightfully dismissive in tone. For sure Russell didn't have a spectacular sense of fantasy, but he was a genius at telling that apart from ordinary, boring madness.
If you haven't read the Republic or any texts on how Sparta was organized, I'm sure it seemed like Russell was saying something.

>>23472691
>Nietzsche sisters... how do we respond to this?
Like this:

>Speaking of Spinoza he says: “How much of personal timidity and vulnerability does this masquerade of a sickly recluse betray!” Exactly the same may be said of him, with the less reluctance since he has not hesitated to say it of Spinoza. It is obvious that in his day-dreams he is a warrior, not a professor; all the men he admires were military.
Russell is indignant on behalf of Spinoza, but doesn't seem to grasp what Nietzsche's saying as part of a chapter on the prejudices of philosophers in Beyond Good and Evil. In point of fact, it's not an insult from Nietzsche, but an example of how philosophers practice the Will to Power, *including Nietzsche himself self-consciously*. For the rest, re: warriors, which is untrue to anyone who'd look at Nietzsche's corpus, it can be 9bserved that at the same time that Russell critiques Nietzsche's rhetoric, he falls for it, and since he's not interested in reading Nietzsche except to be forced to say something or other for his history, he of course never picks up on anything like Nietzsche saying philosophers are legislators of value, and that it's people like Plato he thinks are the highest types, even disagreeing with their exercise of Will to Power.

>His opinion of women, like every man’s, is an objectification of his own emotion towards them, which is obviously one of fear. “Forget not thy whip”—but nine women out of ten would get the whip away from him, and he knew it, so he kept away from women, and soothed his wounded vanity with unkind remarks.
Russell was from a Whiggish family that took radical stances, notwithstanding his grandmother's traditionalism. This is just blinking and taking his own sentiments for granted as true and obvious and without need of proof. Social life, to anyone observant, shows that Nietzsche is right.

>>23472691
He wasn't wrong. Well, I guess I could say he may have been wrong about the whip part, there would be no resistance, Nietzsche would just give one the whip.

>>23470479
>subjective faith
Philosophy has arguments.
Maths just illustrates the implications of a predicate. It does not advance understanding one bit.