Bertrand Rasel - dve prekretnice u empirizmu

Abstract

'Empiricism' always tended to be scientific philosophy. Starting from Quine's list of 'five milestones' of empiricism, this article shows that B. Russell made substantial contribution to at least two of them. The first Russell's contribution concerns the shift from ideas to words and displays itself in his view that philosophy as such is logic and that real philosophical problems reduce upon analysis to logical problems. According to Russell, in analyzing language by means of which we describe the world philosophy should use the method of logical analysis since ordinary language is ontologically misleading and it is frequently the case that the grammatical and logical forms of language are incongruent. The source of most philosophical problems lies in this incongruence. The second Russell's contribution to the development of contemporary empiricism concerns the shift from terms to sentences and consists in the use of the method of paraphrases or contextual definition. Russell employed this method to show that descriptions are 'incomplete symbols', which acquire meaning only in context and have no significance on their own account. The philosophically most interesting point is that Russellian analysis is very significant for our treatment of ontological issues.