Bertrand Russell [1929i]

Abstract

There are those who have called our era unphilosophical and held its achievements to be confined to technology and science. To the more discerning eye, however, this judgment appears unjustified, for it employs the wrong standard. To be sure, we do not find in our day philosophy as it was understood in past centuries, philosophical systems and world views — or where we do find these, they are mere pale reflections of past systems. Instead, the real philosophy of our day has developed along with the positive sciences and can only be discovered if we keep our eyes open for the special form of philosophical thinking that is an outgrowth of the construction of scientific concepts and the mental apparatus of the sciences. This philosophy has, to be sure, not yet become an objective system; for the present it is more a cast of mind than a store of factual results, and its development into a science along the lines of the other sciences is reserved for the future. This is the reason that there is so little awareness of this new philosophy. There are probably a good many philosophically minded professional scientists, but there are few philosophers. The following remarks are dedicated to one of these, the worthiest representative of such a philosophy of the positive sciences: Bertrand Russell.