''My Philosophical Development'' is a 1959 book by the philosopher

Bertrand Russell Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) was a British mathematician, philosopher, logician, and public intellectual. He had a considerable influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, linguistics, ...

, in which the author summarizes his philosophical beliefs and explains how they changed during his life..

Summary

Russell gives an account of his philosophical development. He describes his

Hegelian Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (; ; 27 August 1770 – 14 November 1831) was a German philosopher. He is one of the most important figures in German idealism and one of the founding figures of modern Western philosophy. His influence extends a ...

period and includes hitherto unpublished notes for a Hegelian philosophy of science. He deals next with the two-fold revolution involved with his abandonment of

idealism In philosophy, the term idealism identifies and describes metaphysical perspectives which assert that reality is indistinguishable and inseparable from perception and understanding; that reality is a mental construct closely connected t ...

and adoption of a

mathematical logic Mathematical logic is the study of formal logic within mathematics. Major subareas include model theory, proof theory, set theory, and recursion theory. Research in mathematical logic commonly addresses the mathematical properties of formal ...

founded upon that of

Giuseppe Peano Giuseppe Peano (; ; 27 August 1858 – 20 April 1932) was an Italian mathematician and glottologist. The author of over 200 books and papers, he was a founder of mathematical logic and set theory, to which he contributed much notation. The sta ...

. After two chapters on ''

Principia Mathematica The ''Principia Mathematica'' (often abbreviated ''PM'') is a three-volume work on the foundations of mathematics written by mathematician–philosophers Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell and published in 1910, 1912, and 1913. ...

'' (1910-1913), he passes to the problems of perception as dealt with in ''Our Knowledge of the External World'' (1914). In a chapter on ‘The Impact of

Wittgenstein Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein ( ; ; 26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951) was an Austrians, Austrian-British people, British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy o ...

’, Russell examines what he now thinks must be accepted and what rejected in that philosopher's work. He notes the changes from earlier theories required by the adoption of William James's view that sensation is not essentially relational and is not per se a form of knowledge. In an explanatory chapter, he endeavors to remove misconceptions of and objections to his theories as to the relation of perception to scientific knowledge. Russell concludes with a reprint of some articles on modern Oxford philosophy.

References

1959 non-fiction books Allen & Unwin books Biographies and autobiographies of mathematicians Books by Bertrand Russell English-language books {{philo-bio-book-stub