Bertrand Russell on Analytical Philsophy

"The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it"

- Bertrand Russell, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism.

Bertrand Russell was born in 1872 in Wales, England as a member of a famous British family. He received a degree from Trinity Cambridge College with honors in Mathematics and Moral Sciences. His most famous works included the subjects of logic and philosophy, which were deeply rooted in his mathematics background. In fact, Russell is probably the most highly regarded and most read English-speaking philosopher of our time. Russell was not merely an intellectual, but also a political and social activist, writing many papers and pamphlets speaking out against war, nuclear technology and Fascism. Russell was, in fact, jailed for writing a pacifist pamphlet speaking out against England's participation in the First World War. Russell was also known as often vehemently speaking out against organized religion, especially that of Christianity. He wrote papers such as, "Why I am not a Christian" and "A Free Man's Worship." He also regarded marriage and sex in way uncommon for those times, and proposed that there was really nothing wrong with college-aged adults having childless encounters before marriage, but still held that marriage is "the best and most important relation that can exist between human beings" . It seems that Russell's theories on marriage and sex may have caused the protest that led to be him being dismissed after an appointment to City College in New York City. Russell, along with his fellow Cambridge alumnus G. E. Moore, were at the forefront of the philosophical movement leading towards anal...

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...my views on perspective differ greatly from those of Russell, as you have seen. Russell believes that all things are open to be subjective to the experiences around them, much like the idea that we can never know the true reality of any object because as soon as you look or realize that the object exists, it changes because we have looked at it. I believe that certain things are as they will always be, and that the changes, if any, given by the subjectivity of certain items is so small as to not make any difference.

While Russell and I disagree on this aspect, there are others that we do agree on, such as his ideas on memory and how it affects our perspective on the present. I believe that this topic is far more difficult that basic metaphysical philosophy, and while the topic was difficult I found that it was an easier read than some metaphysical philosophers