วีดีโอ

So what is the Free World doing now? Banning everything that doesn't follow the agenda. Restrictions Communism could never achieve.

He said "avoid dogmatism"

It is one of Bach's cello solos. He composed several. If you search Bach's cello solos on TH-cam and listen to them you can identify this specific one.

He's not playing it. He's sawing it in half.

I don't think this is a very relevant post but anyway: 1. He was by no means the only one, it was a dominant current in maths and logic at the time. 2. Probably to say that the British ruling class was, on the whole, taken by surprise by Hitler's invasion of Poland. The key military technologies like radar, rolling bombs etc. and strategies like Ultra were all developed during WWII. 3. Ronald Reagan had no idea that the Soviet Union was going to collapse when it did, and arguably did nothing to promote that collapse. Russell didn't pose as anything. He was an influential public thinker thanks to his effort to make the moral issues of the day accessible. He did not flounce around spurting random bits of Latin while holding a paltry 2:2. An ability to present alternative arguments with clarity and insight is essential in a democratic society.

@@Mekchanoid Reagan had good intelligence on Russia in the '80s; their economy was weakening while their military ambitions rose. It was now or never. Reagan was tough on Russia, invaded Grenada, bombed Libya, supported Thatcher in the Falklands. Reagan ramped up the arms race on the strength of his tax cuts of '86, which grew our economy and raised tax revenues to new highs; and he challenged Gorbachev and the Soviets, "Tear down this wall." Which they did....

@@Mekchanoid Russell's mistakes in math and logic still pushed the subject forward (via Godel?). And Russell was also the one to point out Frege's fatal flaw in set theory. As for his politics, I don't know.

he had a habit of being a contain with the subjects he wasn't massively engaged in sure but you entirely mischaracterize his philosophy of mathematics and logic. next time start and end with his politics and social awareness, that's where he lacked i agree. to try and tie his philosophy of maths and logic into all that is just strange, you're right he's not Churchill lmao he was just an academic, and what do you know his skills weren't in political 'directing' or fighting Hitler, but in academics, logic and maths. He really did not 'pose as a wise man' he was just an academic, and offered some social and political insight to topics he really wasn't that engaged in, should be regarded in the same way you would with a college professor, he was speaking to his students, not as a 'director' but as an educator. But either way very strange mode of attacking a philosophical position here, maths and logic are very far detached from the actual things you accuse Russel of doing

You get the dummy-award for that comment for not supporting your charges, stupid. You said: "but you entirely mischaracterize his philosophy of mathematics and logic." How do you know that? Which part of his philosophy, you fraud? Back up your charges already. @@thomdotexe

Because Russell's PM was ill-conceived, a dead end, exposed by Godel as trying to do the impossible, and shows how muddle-headed Russell was at dealing with the significance trivial paradoxes of his own making. His ramified theory of types committed the reification fallacy too. Wittgenstein's Blue Book and PI are out of Russell's league philosophically and will endure long after Russell's work, a mediocre footnote to Plato, is forgotten, I think.

Dexter Haven I hardly think it was muddle headed of Russell to attempt PM. It took a work which Von Neumann described as something like "a supreme monument which will stand out for ages" to show that the project couldn't be achieved - a project which no less a mathematician than Hilbert thought could be achieved. Russell's paradox was hardly "trivial". It undermined the attempt to define numbers as classes of classes which was fundamental to logicism and which seemed to have a strong and intuitive foundation. I suspect Wittgenstein's is only given such indulgence because of Russell's endorsement. The tractatus contains barely anything amounting to an argument. The celebrated Private Language argument of the later Philosophical Investigations isn't very impressive and is, I think, adequately refuted by A J Ayer in his essay on "Wittgenstein on Private Language". Many interesting and penetrating arguments can be read into Wittgenstein. Most obviously, Saul Kripke presented an interesting argument in "Rules and Private Language" which is a much better argument against private language, but not one attributable to Wittgenstein, except on a very generous and indulgent reading. (Kripke didn't claim to be reading Wittgenstein, but relating an argument which struck him as he read Wittgenstein). Principia Mathematica certainly demonstrated a set of mathematico-logical skills beyond anything Wittgenstein ever demonstrated. The fact that PM failed impugns Russell's ability to the extent that Einstein's achievements impugn Newton's. Amongs Russell's solid contributions were definite-descriptions technique to avoid contradictory statements of existence/non-existence, Interesting discussions in epistemology and many dissolutions of pseudo-problems through sensible reanalyses using first order predicate logic. What would you cite from Philosophical Investigations to evidence Wittgenstein's superior philosophical ability?

Edward Jones You say, "The fact that PM failed impugns Russell's ability to the extent that Einstein's achievements impugn Newton's." I disagree. For me, Russell was no Newton and did not offer the equivalent of the laws of motion, the calculus, or the theory of colors for generations to rely on as Newton did. Of what mathematical significance is the class of all classes that don't belong to themselves? It smacks of the man-made Barber's Paradox to me, but Russell treated it as a piece of furniture one might trip over. As Wittgenstein said, does it mean a bridge designed according to calculations might fall down? No. Russell's work was of little utility, born of the bogus reification of classes, even his 1905 article in Mind on definite descriptions does not hold up like Witt's PI or Blue Book does today; and Russell's use of knowledge by "acquaintance" is too vague. One feels like he wanted to make a stipulation but forgot. Plus, his application to bald kings and golden mountains was ultimately trivial, given that we all knew from fiction that golden mountains could be spoken of without existing in reality, as could dead kings. Russell reified numbers and words. His rebuttal to ordinary language philosophy in "The Cult of Common Usage" was confused and useless. He was glib, but not penetrating like Wittgenstein, or J.L. Austin. Wittgenstein was a much better problem solver in philosophy than Russell, I'd say. Wittgenstein changed how people thought about words, as tools with special functions, odd jobs, which lacked a metaphysical, abstract meaning apart form their use in our Sprachspiel (language-game). His method in PI #116 alone was what philosophy needed then, and his PI #120 by itself was better than Russell's entire book The Problems of Philosophy for me, anyway. Russell trotted out the same ill-worded ideas about sense-data theory that Austin demolished later in Sense & Sensibilia. Russell wasn't fit to carry Austin's briefcase, in my humble opinion, either. Russell stayed a "logical atomist" decades after Wittgenstein explained ca. 1932 how the false analogy to chemistry that started it was ill-fitting too. (Cf. PI #47) Russell was good for chatter in the drawing room among aristocrats, I'll admit, though.

Dexter Haven​​​ I agree about Newton. I was talking about ability not output though. PM was a great stab at doing something which was thought feasible in mathematical circles but required a lot of work and mathematical-philosophical ingenuity. But you're right, it didn't advance philosophy of math the way Newton advanced math/physics. You have misunderstood the point of classes of classes by assimilating them to Russell's paradox. Classes of Classes were introduced as a way of defining numbers: zero was given a primitive definition and subsequent numbers generated through a recursion taking the primitive definition as a base. To take the easier example, do you know how the primitive definition ran? Do you think it an adequate definition? Russell's paradox was a check on the assumption behind the introduction of a class definition of number (that classes could be generated on intuitive lines without restriction) but it didn't impugn his number defintion, which was fine (if you disagree, as I said, state at least the primitive definition and what was wrong with it). Wittgenstein notoriously had a poor understanding of the technicalities of PM and of Godel's incompletness theorem. Godel said of the pair that Russell had some mistaken but insightful objections to IT whereas Wittgenstein's objections were muddled and trivial. You have referred to the "fallacy" of reification and the "bogus" reification of classes. "Fallacy" seems inappropriate since reification is illegitimate relative to context where a true fallacy isn't. There's nothing wrong with reification if it has some indispensable explanatory utlity - it's done all the time. The relevant question is whether the reification is eliminable. For example, the statement "A group of men walked to the shop" is an eliminable reification since it can be reduced to "John, Paul and Ringo walked to the shop" and hence involves an unnecessary proliferation of objects (groups as well as men). The statement "the police were looking for a group of men" does not involve an eliminable invocation of "group" since the statement "the police were looking for John, Paul and Ringo" is not an acceptable reduction. So why is Russell's introduction of classes illegitimate? It goes back to the same issue of number concepts and you can use the same example I've invited you to explain earlier: what is Russell's primitive definition of zero and what is the substitution which eliminates reference to classes, in your opinion? The question of definite-descriptions suggests a misunderstanding: of course everyone knows that these things don't exist. The point was to translate the statements about them into a form without the grammatical features which lead to the philosophical confusion. The philosophical confusion being "we know this isn't being said but it looks like it on a casual reading". "Glib" would be Wittgenstein's comments on Incompleteness Theorems which most people, including Godel, thought involved technicalities which eluded Wittgenstein. Yes, Wittgenstein is credited with "dissolving" purported Philosophical problems by showing that they are a result of being mislead by the "grammar" of language - For example treating nouns as referring expressions requiring an object having existed in virtue of which they have meaning. So much is standard boiler plate Wittgenstein exegesis. Can you give an example of a problem he solved with this approach? But in any case this trend was exemplified by Russell himself in e.g. his definite description work. Apparently Wittgenstein was led to reconsider his earlier work because Pierro Sraffa taught him a rude Sicilian gesture and he realised meaning could be expressed without a "logical structure" - quite an obvious proposal and what kind of "deep" work can be so readily undercut!? Russell's work had little influence amongst the aristocrats?!? His mathematical work was too obscure. The Bloomsbury set were more interested in and influenced by Moore's Principia Ethica. 

Edward Jones I think you made some interesting points, thank you, too many for me to address in toto right now, as I have an active channel and many posts to respond to each day, so as not to get backed up, plus new videos to make, as in my most recent upload, "Top 10 Dead Porn Stars." Soon to be a classic. ;) ">Can you give an example of a problem he solved with this approach?" Good question, and I like a the spirit of application it embodies, something we need more of in philosophy, I believe. Sure. Much ink had been spilled and words exchanged debating the answer to the question "Can a machine think?" Wittgenstein, showing a perceptiveness Russell lacked, I think, dispatched with the kernel of the confusion by saying it looks like a question of fact when it's really a question of grammar - no matter what a machine can do, which is a separate issue of fact, we tend to object to using the word "think" to describe it, as that term is freighted with connotations of exclusively human activity, not as an activity of a machine. Wittgenstein also had the best response I've read yet to Heraclitus's assertion "You can't step into the same river twice." And to Descartes. "I think , therefore I am." If you were choosing up sides for a team of top philosophers to assemble either for a dream department or to advise yourself, and it was down to Russell and Wittgenstein left, who would you honestly pick? My top five picks, for my dream department, by the way, would be: Aristotle, Hume, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Austin.