ONT Epicyclic Recidivicious Regression Of Russell
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| Error is human, judgment divine,
| The Gamesmeister says it, not I.
Russell's Anabasis
The trajectory of this comic scatter will require us to plot
an ampler smatter of points than usual before we can connect
the dots and start to recognize the pattern as we retrace it.
It doesn't really matter where we begin, not in the long run,
so let us seize on a single point that is expeditious enough
to give a nominal outset to our hopeful if doomed expedition.
| In spite of this commitment to technical philosophy, Russell
| expressed in letters to Ottoline Morrell a revulsion toward this
| kind of philosophy. He remarked in later autobiographical writing
| that this attitude followed the long years of concentrated logical
| work on "the big book", 'Principia Mathematica'. But he also told
| Ottoline Morrell that he had not forsaken technical philosophy and
| had begun rereading philosophers of the past as a preparation for
| his next major work, which he was not yet ready to begin writing.
| In fact, he may have been influenced by a desire to work at the
| kind of philosophy which was of interest to Ottoline Morrell, who
| was a woman of sophisticated artistic, intellectual, and political
| interests, but uneducated in symbolic logic and mathematics. Russell
| attributed to her a broadening of his tastes, interests, and sympathies,
| and he longed to share his intellectual life with her; at their lovers'
| meetings they read Plato and Spinoza, and from their discussions a book
| emerged which they referred to as "Prisons", dealing with the ability
| of philosophy to free the mind and spirit from the trammels of the
| here and now. This book, the text of which is lost, reached the
| stage of typescript, and part of it was published in modified
| form by Russell as a journal article. The borderline between
| philosophy on the one hand, and religion and normative ethics
| on the other, occupied part of Russell's interest, and can be
| seen in the final chapter of 'The Problems of Philosophy'.
|
| ERE, TOK 1913, xi.
|
| Bertrand Russell,
|'Theory of Knowledge: The 1913 Manuscript',
| Edited by Elizabeth Ramsden Eames, in collaboration with Kenneth Blackwell,
| First published in 1984 by George Allen & Unwin; Routledge, London, UK, 1992.
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