Abstract
Bertrand Russell is presented as the first philosopher who attempted to be both exact and in tune with the science of his day. Certain rules of philosophical method are ferreted out of his writings. These rules can be summarized in the slogan: “To philosophize is to apply the scientific method to the study of human knowledge.” Russell’s failures may be construed as occasional unfaithfulnesses to his own regulae. And these lapses may be explained as the price paid for his attachment to two mutually incompatible philosophical traditions: those of British empiricism and Platonism.
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Notes
The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, Vol. III, George Allen and Unwin, London, 1969, p. 37.
My Philosophical Development, George Allen and Unwin, London, 1959, p. 217.
Ibid.
Loc. cit., p. 230.
Our Knowledge of the External World [1914], George Allen and Unwin, London, 1949, p. 42.
An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, George Allen and Unwin, London, 1940, Chap. VI.
Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits, George Allen and Unwin, London, 1948, passim. He conceives of induction as “an application of mathematical probability to premisses arrived at independently of induction” (p. 451).
See my book The Myth of Simplicity, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1963.
The Philosophy of Logical Atomism, Lecture VIII, repr. in Logic and Knowledge (ed. by R. C. Marsh), George Allen and Unwin, London, 1956, p. 280.
My Philosophical Development, p. 254.
For a discussion of the applicability of this method in philosophy, social science, and biology, see my book Method, Model and Matter, Reidel, Dordrecht, 1973.
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© 1973 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht-Holland
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Bunge, M. (1973). Bertrand Russell’s Regulae Philosophandi . In: Bunge, M. (eds) The Methodological Unity of Science. Theory and Decision Library, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-2667-3_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-2667-3_1
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