Russell Quotes Flashcards
Evidence of Cartesian like scepticism
‘all [beliefs] may be reasonably doubted’
How does Russell define ‘sensation’?
‘sense-data’ or the ‘experience of being immediately aware of these things’
What does the argument from no absolute vantage point force Russell to conclude?
‘various sensations [are] at most signs of some property which perhaps cause all sensations’
How does Russell use an image of a blind man to illustrate why direct realism is too reductive?
A blind man can ‘experience a wave-motion by a sea voyage’ but experiencing light itself is something ‘which we can never describe to him’
What can we never be acquainted with?
We can never be ‘acquainted directly with the quality in the physical object which makes it look blue or red’
How does Russell agree with Berkeley?
For having ‘shown that the existence of matter is capable of being denied without absurdity’
What does referring to ‘public neutral objects’ do?
‘begs the very question at issue’ and so is a circular argument
Example that Russell considers where appearance isn’t reality? What does Russell label this?
‘No logical impossibility in the supposition that the whole of life is a dream’
A ‘less simple hypothesis’
Why, if sense data didn’t correspond to matter, would it be unintelligible to claim a cat is hungry?
‘it cannot be hungry, since no hunger but my own can be sense-datum to me’
How does Locke support the existence of matter?
Involuntary nature of experience:
Sensations ‘force themselves on me’ so that ‘I can’t avoid having them’
What does Russell charge DR with?
‘Physical science has drifted into the view that all natural phenomena ought to be reduces to motions’
In later works, how does Russell try to amend the relationship between material objects and sense data?
The world is made of only one substance ‘called mental in one arrangement, physical in the other’
