The Problems of Philosophy Book

I studied Philosophy years ago before moving on to Physics. Recently, my dad (now retired) announced that he might head back to uni to study philosophy to keep his brain ticking over, and I decided to reread my copy of this before loaning it to him as a nice intro, or at least relatively nice - It’s essentially a philosopher’s job to try to be the fussiest and most pedantic person on the planet as far as humanly possible. Still, you can hardly ask for a better guide through the territory than Bertrand Russell, a practical Everyman in a field full of seriously strange people (philosophy really should come with a mental health warning).

Reading this now through more of a scientific lens, certain ideas hit harder. Throughout the book, Russell essentially makes the case that it’s not the job of Philosophy (or within its abilities) to ascertain absolute truths about the world, but rather, assess our ‘state of knowledge’ of things and produce a hierarchy or framework, based on the value of each state.

This isn’t so different from the Bayesian view, widely and increasingly used in astronomy and many other areas of science, which (though more fleshed out and with a complete mathematical framework) can essentially be boiled down to, ‘truth or falsity isn’t absolute, rarely 1 or 0, but exists on a continuum between them’. This comes in handy when comparing theoretical models (among other things) and is a lesson that could stand to be more widely learned in all walks of life in the fight against tribalism and bias. When we adopt a dogmatic view of the world, we assume our state of ignorance is 0, when it could be 0.3 or 0.648 or 0.999.

That said, there are places in which its views are out of date, for example, discussing the ‘order of events’ as being absolute even while their appearance may vary spatially is half right, as relativity teaches us that our frame of reference can significantly affect our perception not only of how events appear, but also the order in which they occur.

If you’re a beginner, any philosophy book you’ll encounter will seem at least slightly laborious as the writer tries to work in detail through every assumption, define every term, address Cartesian doubt for the millionth time and so on, but at around 100 pages and giving a brief overview of many of the problems of his day which are still relevant now, this is a perfectly good place to start. It’s also quite funny in places, especially when addressing other philosophers. There’s no better kind of bitchiness than when one philosopher criticises another.

To put it in his own words:

“Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answer can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination, and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.”

Amen, brother.