The Problems of Philosophy

Bertrand Russell is an excellent writer and a clear thinker. This book serves as a great, short introduction to Russell's approach to the problems of philosophy. The problems Russell addresses are primarily epistemological. Russell's primary questions revolve around the question: what do we know, and how do we know it? Russell first argues for the appearance/reality distinction and offers a sense-datum theory of the foundations of knowledge (for a very interesting critique of sense datum theories I recommend Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austin). But, Russell argues, sense data on their own cannot account for our knowledge. We must have some knowledge of general principles, and some kind of inductive principle, if we are going to derive any knowledge from sense data to arrive at knowledge that is not immediate (Russell also includes memory in immediate forms of knowledge). Russell examines the meaning of truth and falsehood and determines three criteria that any theory of the truth must meet, and then, in the last two chapters, Russell attempts to determine the limits and the value of philosophy. In terms of straight forward clarity of analytic philosophers, and Russell is one of the best, which is one of the reasons why he won the Nobel prize for literature in 1950.