Russell, of course! March 2, 2009
Posted by Colin in Odds 'n' Ends.trackback
Okay so Leiter ran this poll and after 1200 votes Wittgenstein came out on top, followed closely by Russell, then David Lewis, Heidegger, and Rawls. Not entirely surprising that these five were very popular choices, but not the precise top five I would have predicted.
At any rate, Brian Weatherson wonders why Russell was so popular. I largely agree with his assessment of Russell. Amongst the most important and rightly influential work he ever did were his article “On Denoting” and his lectures on Logical Atomism. But then Weatherson says something surprising: “Principia Mathematica was a great project, but it does seem to have ended in failure.” True on both counts, but the tone here is dismissive. How could PM be important if it ended in failure! Well, that strikes me as a bizarre metric of success.
Yes, I voted for Russell and yes, it is silly to waste time defending one’s vote in a poll that was meant for amusement. But it just seems so wrong to deny the importance of PM. I felt compelled to say something in defense of Russell. As we all know, PM was not entirely novel. It was an extension of the logicist project that Frege had undertaken. In response to the set-theoretic paradox he had found in Frege’s system, Russell constructed a typed theory. The other important difference was the scale of the project. PM spelled out in great detail the reduction of all of set theory, the real numbers, the ordinals, and the cardinals to logic plus some axioms. The undertaking was monumental and is often claimed to have been the most important work of logic since Aristotle. While the incompleteness results of Gödel prove that the aspirations of PM were unattainable, that hardly undermines the significance of the project. If nothing else, Russell can be held largely responsible for popularizing Fregean formal methods and for making significant progress on the extents to which the reductive logicist project can succeed.
On the other hand, how the hell did Wittgenstein take the number one spot?
[...] some interesting thoughts on Russell’s ranking here and here. Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)NBA Power Rankings, Week 3Ranking the [...]
Russell the Apollonian logician deserves respect; Russell the Dionysian filosophe and belle-lettrist (or would-be Dionysian), had shortcomings. The Tractatus would not have occurred but for Russell though Russell should have probably retired from the philosophy business in the 20’s (in a sense he did, after realizing the significance–if not vacuity– of St. Ludwig’s tautological views of formal logic). Russell’s On Denoting remains an important document as does the Principia and the Principles of Mathematics (quite an encyclopedic work, which features Russell’s paradox, his account of Frege, early version of Theory of Types, criticism of Kant, etc ). Goedel’s counterexample (if it is) does not refute logicism as a whole.
Russell’s philosophy of science writing, relativity, etc. remains somewhat relevant. Analysis of Mind was not a bad discussion of modern psychology, and Russell has some interesting comments on Wm James and behaviorism. Like Hume, Russell wrote quite eloquent prose, a skill rather lacking in the average Anglo or American philosophy student
Politically, Russell was a bit naive, somewhat Shelleyan in a sense. His socialism seemed a bit too utopian, though his comments on marxism not completely worthless. He had the British arrogance and glibness that bothers most yankees. His political and economic writing, while well-informed, often insisted on utopian ideals, though some of his writing (after WWII) suggests a more cynical and gloomy outlook. While the 60’s leftists may have thought him a bit odd (if not fruity) he did criticize the pop-mysticism and bad marxism of the new left, while also denouncing the right, and the Vietnam War. Really, he’s a creature of the 19th century, of the era of Godwin, the Mills, Wollstonecraft, and the Shelleys, PBS with integrals and a page of proofs.