I understand philosophy before 1943 now. Which book can I read to understand philosophy after 1943?
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I understand philosophy before 1943 now. Which book can I read to understand philosophy after 1943?
>I understand philosophy before 1943 now
You forgot to add "picture unrelated". If this is not the case, no you don't.
It's a very good book. I can't think of another example of someone who is preeminent in their field who takes the time to write an popular overview book which isn't condescending. Russell was a great writer, very lucid, and while he is definitely opinionated he is never unfair (he gives Rousseau a hard time but Rousseau was a piece of shit; and I remember him going off on Nietzsche but when I reread it he was actually quite nuanced and subtle - this was written while bombs were falling on London by people who claimed Nietzsche as their inspiration, so it would be understandable if Russell wasn't feeling generous, but he was really quite fair.)
>and while he is definitely opinionated he is never unfair
Lol
LMAO even
Someone posting a basedjak to something he disagrees with is probably fairer than Russell
Half the chapters about Schopenhauer and Nietzsche are b***hing about Nazis and differing moral systems, with some personal attacks mixed in. I found it more amusing than anything and it was understandable given when the book was written. The only other criticism I have is that the modern section felt a lot more rushed than the Greek and Catholic ones. I wish he had moved a lot of that focus into the modern period that I'm more interested in.
Overall I agree and liked the book. It probably helps that I'm familiar with mathematical logic and understand the framework Russell is criticizing from. The book was a good overview of philosophy that also taught me a lot about European history and was surprisingly funny for something borderline academic.
>among animals, at a later stage, a new bifurcation appeared: instinct and intellect became more or less separated. They are never wholly without each other, but in the main intellect is the misfortune of man, while instinct is seen at its best in ants, bees, and Bergson.
Wrong. Russell is at his strongest when he's discussing Leibniz (who he wrote a very good monograph on earlier in his life), but with just about every other figure, all he does is shittalk them for not developing/using the kind of formal logic he desired or subscribing to the kind of progressive liberalism that he subscribed to. When you get him on details, he's often terrible in his understanding and very obviously leaning on summaries (this is evident with his treatment of the Greeks), and in cases like Rousseau, Hegel, or Nietzsche, he prefers actively trying to refute them instead of doing his duty of providing the reader an overview, and those refutations, embarrassingly for a logicist, take the form of quips and one-liners, and almost never evince any understanding of their targets. The book has something to say for it in being well-written, since Russell's an entertaining stylist, but that's an extraordinarily low standard. And his moralism, always taking over his overviews, seems ill-advised, given this feminist polyamourous sort abandoned his first wife cruelly, slept with Eliot's wife, slept with his son's wife, and muttered and b***hed over his later lovers having their own boyfriends over by the time Bertie couldn't get it up to satisfy anyone. Great when I read it as a high schooler, terrible after actually reading all of the figures discussed.
>all he does is shittalk them for not developing/using the kind of formal logic he desired
This is justified. If they claim they are making logical arguments and their arguments are not reducible to formal mathematical logic like he developed, they are empirically wrong and not using "logic" in the same sense as anyone who makes a living with objective descriptions of reality.
I wouldn't say he's 'trying to refute' other ethical systems. He's good enough at logic to know he can't and instead just shills his own preferences with amusing quips. He does spend a lot of time talking about ethics, though. I don't really deduct too many points for that since everyone does it and at least he's not making inane claims about provability. Maybe it's not becoming of a historian, but it only applies to a history of people getting btfo by Hume, anyway.
Would have been nice if Witty wrote it instead
They don't claim that philosophy is exclusively if not predominantly logical argument, that's *Russell's* prejudice informed by an unthinking acceptance of the Enlightenment's mathematical physics. So no, he's not justified, because he's in such a rush to find his own opinions confirmed that, not finding them confirmed, he leaps into judgements *that aren't even strong critiques* because he never takes the time to observe that reason for almost everyone prior to his generation of logicists was much broader than formal logic. As his "history" stands, you rarely and only accidentally get to glimpse what another philosopher intended or aimed to do, because Russell's busier telling you why they all fall short of *Russell's* intentions and purposes, with almost no cognizance that they mught be doing something substantially different than him.
It's justified to whatever extent they are making the claim that they're reasoning logically. And sometimes he does point out that what they're talking about is coming from non-logical places and gives his thoughts on where. He doesn't get big on the shit talk unless it's someone like Hegel who (Russell says) is claiming to be reasoning logically. I guess it's possible that Russell is just wrong about that and I wouldn't know, but I assume that when he explicitly says they were in order to shit talk them that he's telling the truth.
He also sometimes does start talking about formal logic without it being shit talk. Like during Aristotle he wasn't calling Aristotle a fricking moron for not getting all of logic right, he was just laying out the modern version in contrast. That seems like a worthwhile thing for a philosopher like Russell to be doing even if it isn't actually history. In fact a lot of the criticism here seems to be that this wasn't purely a history, but instead a history + Russell's philosophy + an occasional diss track. It's fine if you want a straight history and maybe the other stuff does distract from that sometimes, it's just not 100% of what this was.
>It's justified to whatever extent they are making the claim that they're reasoning logically.
This is by and large not what they were doing historically. There's not even really this thing called logic (in Greek, logike) until *after* Aristotle; for Aristotle, what *we* call his logic he describes as rules for certain kinds of inferences, and the most abundantly notable thing in his work is that they don't appear anywhere near as much as you'd ever expect.
I'll put it this way. Russell, from his close study of Leibniz, readily grants that Leibniz was a thinker who employed an exoteric manner of expression while keeping his private thoughts reserved. Russell *ignores* this in almost every other thinker. The import of this is that Russell will grant that Lebniz uses bad arguments on purpose, or even what you might call rhetoric that looks like formal argument. Except this is more or less how just about every thinker before the 18th century wrote--it's why Plato wrote dialogues where he's never the speaker, why Aristotle barely employs his famous "logic", why Descartes uses two medieval proofs of god that don't even work with each other, why Spinoza uses a mathematical organization of the Ethics that he elsewhere says is unphilosophical, and why Rousseau and Nietzsche lean in to poetry and "literary" stylings to camouflage their thinking in. Russell grants this for Leibniz, because he got to read the letters and manuscriots where Leibniz occasionally reveals this, but with everyone else, Russell leans on summaries, and those summaries are all likely ones that also expect mathematical physics, so everythinglooks like it's fallen short. With Hegel, this is infuriating, because I'm not a Hegelian, but I made the effort to bang my head up against his work, and literally nothing Russell says comes close to resembling Hegel, and Russell used to be a Idealist in the late 19th century, so this should be embarrassing for him to get wrong.
With Aristotle's logic, well, just read:
>“Nonetheless, Aristotle’s logical writings show great ability, and would have been useful to mankind if they had appeared at a time when intellectual originality was still active. Unfortunately, they appeared at the very end of the creative period of Greek thought, and therefore came to be accepted as authoritative. By the time that logical originality revived, a reign of two thousand years had made Aristotle very difficult to dethrone. Throughout modern times, practically every advance in science, in logic, or in philosophy has had to be made in the teeth of the opposition from Aristotle’s disciples.”
Even when someone does something novel and revolutionary, Russell gets irritated and backhands him because of Catholicism and historical circumstances he'd have no way of effecting.
Aside from what you mentioned, this has also aged very poorly lol. Aristotelianism is big in contemporary philosophy of science.
>This is by and large not what they were doing historically.
That's the impression I got, and why the entire book isn't shit talk.
Regarding Aristotle, Russell talked a lot about the distinction between what Aristotle did and the effects it had. Apparently he was still fighting Catholics in his time. Even what you quoted isn't a repudiation of Aristotle, just people who treated him as too perfect. I was surprised about how little praise he heaped on the guy that invented his field, but really that was just a tonal thing and not a truth one. Maybe that's one thing anon meant by calling Russell 'fair'. Russell avoids attempting logically invalid refutations and acknowledges inherent subjectivity in philosophy. (Apart from logic specifically where most people agree Russell is right.) He just talks a lot about ethics and uses a tone which isn't as impartial and conciliatory as you might expect from a logician who acknowledges there's no objective basis for knowledge.
That's interesting. How so? Has it had any impact on science?
In any case Russell's claim can't age that badly since it's about the past. Maybe people did have to fight a bunch of Aristotelians to advance, and that would remain true even if people suddenly discovered that Aristotle's paradigm is better after all. Realistically I doubt that modern logic and science are going to be found inferior to Aristotle's even if they can be refined back in his general direction.
>Has it had any impact on science?
It's indispensable for biology as a whole and appealing for chemistry as well.
>In any case Russell's claim can't age that badly since it's about the past. Maybe people did have to fight a bunch of Aristotelians to advance, and that would remain true even if people suddenly discovered that Aristotle's paradigm is better after all.
Russell's claims are in turn uninformed, a lazy head nod to the narratives of his day which primarliy British and Protestant in origin for the purpose of dismissing the Continental Europeans who were Catholic and explaining to themselves (the British, that is) why they were better, wiser, and more moral. This stuff is shown up by historians like Edward Grant, Marshall Clagett, David Lindberg, and James Hannam, who all show that logic, math, and science, continued to develop and adjust and morph, and only stopped on account of Rome's collapse and subsequent invasions, making any kind of intellectual practice difficult.
Russell spilled his s-y latte over everyone he disagreed with. He literally uses "liberal" synonymously with "good" towards the end of the book. But even at the start of the book he acts like a moron. He says of Plato's cosmology that "he doesn't know if it's serious" while he devotes an entire page to talking about a fricking plenum.
what's a better history/intro for philosophy?
You are mistaken. There was no philosophy before 1943 and also not after it. The only time philosophy existed was a few days in june 1943.
>Russell's "History"
you don't know who Kierkegaard is
Your picrel seems like a good overview, but overviews cannot give real understanding. If you want to understand philosophy, read philosophy. Not history.
Copleston is the only correct answer regarding histories of philosophy. You know nothing of philosophy if this slop is your first contact with it.
Read Copleston's history instead