The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download

Philosophy · 1912

The Problems of Philosophy

By Bertrand Russell · (Published 1912) · All Bertrand Russell books

Word Count ~46,000 words (estimated)

Reading Time Approx. 2.5 hours (estimated)

Copyright Status Public Domain in the US; check local laws

Source Project Gutenberg #5827

Source Edition Project Gutenberg #5827

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Chapter I: Appearance and Reality

Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it? This question, which at first sight might not seem difficult, is really one of the most difficult that can be asked. When we have realized the obstacles in the way of a straightforward and confident answer, we shall be well launched on the study of philosophy—for philosophy is merely the attempt to answer such ultimate questions, not carelessly and dogmatically, as we do in ordinary life and even in the sciences, but critically, after exploring all that makes such questions puzzling, and after realizing all the vagueness and confusion that underlie our ordinary ideas.

In daily life, we assume as certain many things which, on a closer scrutiny, are found to be so full of apparent contradictions that only a great amount of thought enables us to know what it is that we really may believe. In the search for certainty, it is natural to begin with our present experiences, and in some sense, no doubt, knowledge is to be derived from them. But any statement as to what it is that our immediate experiences make us know is very likely to be wrong. It seems to me that I am now sitting in a chair, at a table of a certain shape, on which I see sheets of paper with writing or print. By turning my head I see out of the window buildings and clouds and the sun. I believe that the sun is about ninety-three million miles from the earth; that it is a hot globe many times bigger than the earth; that, owing to the earth’s rotation, it rises every morning, and will continue to do so for an indefinite time in the future. I believe that, if any other normal person comes into my room, he will see the same chairs and tables and books and papers as I see, and that the table which I see is the same as the table which I feel pressing against my arm. All this seems to be so evident as to be hardly worth stating, except in answer to a man who doubts whether I know anything. Yet all this may be reasonably doubted, and all of it requires much careful discussion before we can be sure that we have stated it in a form that is wholly true.

To make our difficulties plain, let us concentrate attention on the table. To the eye it is oblong, brown and shiny, to the touch it is smooth and cool and hard; when I tap it, it gives out a wooden sound. Any one else who sees and feels and hears the table will agree with this description, so that it might seem as if no difficulty would arise; but as soon as we try to be more precise our troubles begin. Although I believe that the table is ‘really’ of the same colour all over, the parts that reflect the light look much brighter than the other parts, and some parts look white because of reflected light. I know that, if I move, the parts that reflect the light will be different, so that the apparent distribution of colours on the table will change. It follows that if several people are looking at the table at the same moment, no two of them will see exactly the same distribution of colours, because no two can see it from exactly the same point of view, and any change in the point of view makes some change in the way the light is reflected.

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The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell: Summary, Characters & Themes

This page is a summary and analysis of The Problems of Philosophy, the short book Bertrand Russell published in 1912 to show what philosophers argue about and why the arguments matter. It is not a history of the subject and names very few of its predecessors. Russell selects one problem per chapter, states it in plain English, and works through it in front of the reader, sometimes changing his ground halfway. The table in Chapter I is the clearest case: it looks solid until he notices that its colour depends on the light and its shape on where he stands, and the remaining fourteen chapters ask what is left once those appearances are set aside.

Russell wrote the book at forty, after a decade of technical work on logic and mathematics. Its form is a ladder rather than a survey: Chapter I establishes that what we see and touch is not the table but an appearance; Chapter II asks whether anything persists behind the appearance; Chapters III and IV test the two obvious answers, that matter is whatever physics describes and that everything is mental. With the ground cleared, Chapter V supplies the machinery of acquaintance and description, and the later chapters spend it: induction (VI), a priori knowledge (VII and VIII), universals (IX and X), self-evidence (XI), truth and falsehood (XII), error and probable opinion (XIII). The last two chapters stand back and ask what metaphysics can deliver and whether the subject earns its place. Each chapter runs to a few thousand words, cites almost nobody, and can be restated in a paragraph.

The most contested move is a principle Russell states in Chapter V and never proves: every proposition we can understand must be composed wholly of constituents with which we are acquainted. He needs it to explain how a person who never met Bismarck can still make true statements about him, and he uses it later to rule out knowledge of things as they are in themselves. The difficulty is that the principle reads like a definition of meaning rather than a discovery about the mind. If it is a definition, then the conclusion that we know only sense-data, universals and our own states is built into the premises, and the middle chapters are less an inference than a restatement. Russell never squarely faces the objection, and it is where later writers have most often broken with him.

The book appeared in 1912 in the Home University Library, a series of short, cheap volumes written by specialists for general readers. Russell was then finishing Principia Mathematica with Alfred North Whitehead, and the logic of that work shapes the chapters on descriptions and on a priori knowledge. The preface is candid about the plan: he confined himself to problems on which he thought something positive could be said, which is why the theory of knowledge takes more space than metaphysics, and he credits unpublished work by G. E. Moore on sense-data and by J. M. Keynes on probability and induction, along with criticism from Gilbert Murray. The book has stayed in print ever since. The text used here is the Project Gutenberg transcription (#5827).

Read the chapters in order on a first pass; the argument is cumulative, and Chapter XII assumes the vocabulary fixed in Chapter V. A second pass is more useful out of sequence: Chapter I for the problem, Chapter VI for the weakest link in the empiricist case, Chapter X for the answer to Kant, Chapter XII for the theory of truth, and Chapter XV for the verdict. Readers who want the same confidence applied to other material can move from here to On the Origin of Species, which argues from accumulated observation, or to The Wealth of Nations, which builds an account of prices from ordinary transactions; A Modest Proposal shows what happens when a chain of argument is followed past the point where its premises hold.

Historical Context

British philosophy in 1912 was still split between the Oxford Hegelians, who treated the world as a single rational whole, and a younger Cambridge group who thought that move emptied knowledge of content. Russell had been a Hegelian himself and broke with the school around 1900, under the influence of G. E. Moore, in favour of the view that perception puts us in touch with an object rather than a mental state. The break produced a decade of technical work on logic and mathematics, and this book is the popular report on it. A reader in 1912 would have known the target at once: the Absolute of Bradley and McTaggart, the kind of system Russell dismantles in Chapter XIV.

Russell was born in 1872 and orphaned young. He read mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, became a fellow there in 1895, and taught logic and philosophy for most of his working life. By 1912 he was forty and famous among specialists rather than with the public: the first volume of Principia Mathematica had appeared in 1910, the second in 1912, and his paradox about the class of all classes that do not contain themselves had already changed the subject. He had also published a theory of definite descriptions in 1905, which is the machinery behind Chapter V. This book is an attempt to set that technical work out for readers with no mathematics at all.

The Home University Library, launched in 1911 by Williams and Norgate, was one of the first British series to sell short scholarly books at a price ordinary readers could pay, in the same market as the reprint libraries. Volumes were commissioned from working scholars and kept brief, which explains the compression of this book and its refusal to survey the field. Choosing a philosopher with a reputation for difficulty was a gamble, and it paid: the book was reprinted again and again and became the volume British students met first when they were sent to read epistemology. It has never gone out of print.

Key Characters & Literary Archetypes

• Appearance and Reality: The pair that organizes Chapter I. Russell keeps a table in view and separates what he is immediately given, a brown oblong that changes with the light, from the table he believes to be there. The conclusion is deliberately modest: he does not deny the table, he denies that the senses deliver it. Every later chapter works inside that gap, which is why the book opens with a piece of furniture rather than a definition.
• Sense-data: Russell’s name for the colour, hardness and tapping sound that are present to the mind in perception. Chapter II uses the term to state what survives doubt: not the table, but the fact that a brown colour is being seen. Chapter III then asks where sense-data come from and concludes that physics describes only their causes and their structure, never their intrinsic nature. The word became the standard term of British epistemology for the next thirty years.
• Knowledge by Acquaintance: The direct relation Russell says we have to things themselves rather than to truths about them. We are acquainted with sense-data, with our own past states through memory, with present mental acts, and, as Chapters IX and X argue, with universals such as whiteness and the relation north of. Acquaintance is the foundation of the system. Everything else has to be built from it, because of the principle, stated once in Chapter V, that a proposition we can understand must have constituents we are acquainted with.
• Knowledge by Description: The indirect knowledge carried by phrases such as the first man to reach the South Pole. In Chapter V Russell shows that people who never met Bismarck can still know truths about him, because the name works as a disguised description assembled from elements the speaker does know. This is the book’s escape hatch: description carries knowledge past the limits of a private experience. The theory of descriptions behind it, published in 1905, was his most influential contribution to logic.
• The Inductive Principle: The assumption that what has happened repeatedly will happen again, isolated in Chapter VI. Russell grants that animals and people form such expectations, and that the sun’s rising tomorrow is as certain as anything we believe, but denies that experience can justify the assumption, since every argument from experience already uses it. His conclusion is stark: either we accept the principle on its own evidence, or we give up every expectation about the future, including the plainest ones.
• Universals: Entities such as whiteness, justice and relations like north of, which Chapter IX argues are neither mental nor located in space and time. Russell separates the world of existence, containing particular things, from a world of being, containing universals, and insists that relations are as real as the terms they relate. Chapter X draws the payoff: a priori knowledge deals with relations among universals, which is how arithmetic can be true of things nobody has yet counted.

Core Literary Themes

• Doubt is a tool, not a destination: Chapter I borrows Descartes’ method and then narrows it. Russell does not end in scepticism: he uses the table’s shifting colour to show that something is indubitable, namely the appearance itself, and the rest of the book builds outward from that. The same rhythm returns at every level, including Chapter XIV, where he doubts systems and keeps the questions. It is why the tone stays calm while the conclusions are corrosive of ordinary confidence. The method also separates him from the sceptic: doubt is used to locate something firm, not to dissolve everything at once.
• All knowledge rests on acquaintance: The load-bearing claim of the book is stated once, in Chapter V, and used everywhere after: a proposition we can understand must be composed of constituents with which we are acquainted. Russell does not argue for it, he announces it, and the chapters on induction, universals and truth all assume it. The effect is a system with one foundation stone, and also a vulnerability. If the principle is a definition of meaning rather than a discovery, the conclusions follow by construction.
• Induction cannot justify itself: Chapter VI is the sharpest piece of argument in the book. Russell shows that the uniformity of nature cannot be proved from experience without begging the question, that probable arguments already presuppose it, and that the appeal to past futures assumes exactly what it is meant to establish. He then declines to abandon the belief, calling it an expectation reason cannot ground. The result is a clean statement of the problem Hume left behind and a refusal to solve it by fiat.
• Mathematics is a priori, and about universals: Chapters VII to X answer Kant. Russell agrees that pure mathematics is a priori, and that its truths would hold in any possible world, but denies Kant’s explanation that the mind imposes its forms on experience. His alternative is that such truths concern relations among universals, which are neither mental nor sensible. The argument keeps necessity while dropping transcendental machinery, and it explains why a short introduction to philosophy gives logic and arithmetic so much room. Realism about universals is the price of that answer, and Russell pays it without complaint.
• Truth is correspondence, not coherence: Chapter XII tests the coherence theory and rejects it: several incompatible sets of beliefs can be equally consistent, and coherence itself presupposes the laws of logic it is supposed to ground. Russell’s alternative is that a belief is true when the relation it asserts actually holds among its objects, so Othello’s belief about Desdemona and Cassio is false because no such relation exists. Truth therefore depends on something outside the believing mind, which is precisely what the idealist denies.

Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of The Problems of Philosophy?

The text here is the Project Gutenberg transcription of the 1912 book, unaltered except for the removal of page numbers and running heads. Russell’s fifteen chapter headings are kept, including the ones he wrote as questions, so the structure of the argument survives the move to a screen. Nothing has been abridged, modernised or annotated, which matters in a book where a single sentence in Chapter V carries the weight of the whole theory of knowledge.

Every chapter is a real chapter mark in the EPUB and the KEPUB rather than a heading buried in a wall of text, so the table of contents matches the book Russell wrote. The one cross-reference in the notes, a pointer to Whitehead’s Introduction to Mathematics, stands where it stood in 1912, and the paragraphs are spaced for reading on a phone, with line lengths short enough that a long sentence does not run off the edge of the screen.

Three formats are provided. EPUB for most readers and for Apple Books, AZW3 for Kindle, KEPUB for Kobo devices that want proper page turns and chapter progress within the book. All three are DRM-free, so the file can be moved between devices, backed up, and still opened in ten years on hardware nobody has built yet.

• Project Gutenberg transcription, via Project Gutenberg #5827 — the complete text, unabridged, with the chapter headings the author set.
• Text kept whole The fifteen chapters appear in Russell’s order, with his headings and his cross-reference, and no summary stands in for his sentences.
• Chapter marks that work Each chapter is a separate entry in the table of contents, so you can go from the table argument to the chapter on truth in two taps.
• Three formats, no lock EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB from one source text, free of DRM, so the same book opens on a Kindle, a Kobo and a laptop.

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