MysticismAndLogic

Mysticism and Logic (Bertrand Russel)

  • essays where hit or miss.
  • Philosophers have felt the need of both science and mysticism. Attempts to harmonize the two make philosophy (for some) greater than science or religion.
  • Plato's Cave: statement of belief in knowledge and reality truer than our senses
  • Mysticism is to be commended as an attitude toward life, not as a creed about the world.
  • Insight, untested and unsupported is an insufficient guarantee of truth.
  • Instinct is least likely to err in practical matters which aid in survival.
  • Some distrust intellect in favor of instincts adapted for survival. Response: It is only through the intellect that we know of the struggle for survival and the evolution of man.
  • Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distortion of their own desires.
  • Scientific philosophy comes nearer to objectivity than any other human pursuit. It gives us the closest constant and most intimate relation with the outer world that is possible.
  • Our whole life if built of a number of primary instincts and impulses. Only that which is in some way connected with these (instincts and impulses) appear to us desirable or important. There is nothing (call it "reason" or "virtue") that can be outside these first movers
  • All meaning must be related to our prime desires.
  • The mere fact of living is not to be desired, but the art of living in contemplation of great things.
  • The solution of the difficulties which formerly surrounded the mathematical infinite is probably the greatest achievement of our age.
  • G Cantor has solved Zeno's paradoxes, turns out that its not true that if you take something away from a collection it always gets smaller. The recognition of this fact removes the difficulties and make an exact science of the infinite.
  • Pure math was discovered by Boole "Laws of thought" 1854
  • Math can be defined as the subject in which we never know what we're talking about, nor weather what we are saying is true.
  • Obviousness is always the enemy of correctness.
  • The whole of arithmetic and algebra has been shown to require 3 indefinable notions and 5 indemonstrable propositions.
  • Most numbers are infinite. Infinitely many more infinite numbers.
  • Philosophy is the science of the possible.
  • You cannot alter the past, but you can also not make the future other than it will be.
  • Obviously you can have no effect on the past. But this does not mean that the past would not have been different if our present wishes had been different. Our present wishes are conditioned by the past and therefore could not be different unless the past was different. The past cannot be different from what it was , but no more can our present wishes be different from what they are.
  • Its hard to discover any state of mind which I am aware of myself alone, as opposed to a complex of which I am a constituent.

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