History of Western Philosophy - Bertrand Russell [472]
All this is rejected by the philosophers who make logical analysis the main business of philosophy. They confess frankly that the human intellect is unable to find conclusive answers to many questions of profound importance to mankind, but they refuse to believe that there is some 'higher' way of knowing, by which we can discover truths hidden from science and the intellect. For this renunciation they have been rewarded by the discovery that many questions, formerly obscured by the fog of metaphysics, can be answered with precision, and by objective methods which introduce nothing of the philosopher's temperament except the desire to understand. Take such questions as: What is number? What are space and time? What is mind, and what is matter? I do not say that we can here and now give definitive answers to all these ancient questions, but I do say that a method has been discovered by which, as in science, we can make successive approximations to the truth, in which each new stage results from an improvement, not a rejection, of what has gone before.
In the welter of conflicting fanaticisms, one of the few unifying forces is scientific truthfulness, by which I mean the habit of basing our beliefs upon observations and inferences as impersonal, and as much divested of local and temperamental bias, as is possible for human beings. To have insisted upon the introduction of this virtue into philosophy, and to have invented a powerful method by which it can be rendered fruitful, are the chief merits of the philosophical school of which I am a member. The habit of careful veracity acquired in the practice of this philosophical method can be extended to the whole sphere of human activity, producing, wherever it exists, a lessening of fanaticism with an increasing capacity of sympathy and mutual understanding. In abandoning a part of its dogmatic pretensions, philosophy does not cease to suggest and inspire a way of life.
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INDEX
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a priori knowledge 138–9, 556, 641–2
Abbasids 392
Abélard, Peter 404–6, 407
Absolute 662–6, 667, 668, 717
absolute monarchy 508–9, 574
absolute space 77, 496
absolute time 496
Academy 67;
Augustine, St 336–7;
closure by Justinian 347;
Roman influence 263;
Scepticism 225–6, 228;
Stoicism 242
acceleration:
Galileo 489–90
Achaeans 19
Acragas, Sicily 60
action 715;
Bergson, H. 718–20, 721–2
actuality 163–4, 166
Adam:
divine right of kings 564, 565, 566;
sin 335, 339–40
Adelard of Bath 203, 406
adjectives:
Aristotle 159–61
Aenesidemus 228–9
Aeschylus 65, 85, 200
aestheticism, romantic movement 617
Aëtius 206
Africa:
Justinian reconquest 348;
Mohammedan conquest 391;
see also North Africa
Agatharcus 200
Agnes, Empress 384–5
agriculture:
classical Greece 20, 24, 25;
Locke, J. 577–8
air:
Anaxagoras 69;
Anaximander 36;
Anaximenes 36;
Aristotle 198;
Empedocles 61, 62
Alaric, King of the Goths 314, 341
Alberic of Tusculum 383, 384
Albertus Magnus 394, 417, 418, 441
Albigenses 410, 413–14, 417
Albumazar 429–30
alchemy 50, 267, 396, 428, 429
Alcibiades 96
Alcuin 367, 368–9
Alexander II, Pope 386
Alexander VI, Pope 460, 466, 468, 471
Alexander the Great 105, 211–14, 257;
Aristotle 157–8, 179;
Diogenes 222;
influence of Hellenism on West 264, 266;
treaties 217
Alexander the Paphlagonian 264–5
Alexandria:
Cynics 223;
Euclid 202;
Hellenism 208, 215;
Jews 298–9,