The Spaces of Knowledge: Bertrand Russell, Logical Construction, and the Classification of the Sciences

British Journal for the History of Philosophy 20 (6):1163-1182 (2012)
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Abstract

What Russell regarded to be the ‘chief outcome’ of his 1914 Lowell Lectures at Harvard can only be fully appreciated, I argue, if one embeds the outcome back into the ‘classificatory problem’ that many at the time were heavily engaged in. The problem focused on the place and relationships between the newly formed or recently professionalized disciplines such as psychology, Erkenntnistheorie, physics, logic and philosophy. The prime metaphor used in discussions about the classificatory problem by British philosophers was a spatial one, with such motifs as ‘standpoints’, ‘place’ and ‘perspectives’ in the space of knowledge. In fact, Russell’s construction of a perspectival space of six-dimensions was meant precisely to be a timely solution to the widely discussed classificatory problem.

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Omar W. Nasim
University of Regensburg

Citations of this work

Russell on Acquaintance with Spatial Properties: The Significance of James.Alexander Klein - 2017 - In Sandra Lapointe & Christopher Pincock, Innovations in the History of Analytical Philosophy. London, United Kingdom: Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 229 – 264.
Bertrand Russell.A. D. Irvine - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

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References found in this work

Essays in Experimental Logic.John Dewey - 1916 - Chicago, IL, USA: Dover Publications. Edited by D. M. Hester & R. B. Talisse.

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