The Analysis of Matter by Bertrand Russell (PDF)

Description

2014 Reprint of 1927 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition. Not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. This works received much attention as a work of first importance not only for philosophers and physicists but for the general reader too. The first of its three parts supplies a statement and interpretation of the doctrine of relativity and of the quantum theory, done with Russell’s habitual uncanny lucidity and humor, as is indeed the entire book. The book is candid and stimulating for both its subject and its treatment and was reviewed by the “Times Literary Supplement” as “one of the best books that Mr. Russell has given us.”

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Very accurated and profound; great. A beautiful and embracing philosophical discussion of many themes concerning matter and other physical concepts in relativity and quantum theory.

⭐This book, although difficult, is worth reading if you’re interested in the history and philosophy of physics, metaphysics, or the philosophy of mind. It captures a remarkable moment in the history of science. General relativity is only twelve years old, and quantum mechanics is still in the process of being formulated. Russell has encountered Heisenberg’s version but not Schrodinger’s, so he knows about the uncertainty principle but not about wavefunctions. He knows about protons and electrons but not neutrons, which will not be discovered for another three years.Russell sees immediately that the new physics holds profound implications for philosophy, and this book represents an early attempt at teasing out those implications. Part I is a lucid, semi-technical exposition of general relativity. It doesn’t shy away from mathematical detail but remains mostly accessible.Part II develops a causal theory of perception. Percepts, Russell argues, are events internal to a perceiver (“in the head”), caused by radiations from real, external regions of spacetime. A key implication of the causal theory of perception, Russell argues, is that percepts carry information about the structure of the perceived events but not about their intrinsic quality. Since all knowledge of the external world is based on percepts, all such knowledge is ultimately knowledge of structure. This aligns with what we find when we look at successful physical theories: all the work is done by equations describing abstract, mathematical, structural properties such as wavelength, while intrinsic qualities of events (such as red, blue, hot, loud, etc.) drop out of the picture. The only intrinsic qualities with which we are acquainted are those of events internal to our brains.It’s in Part III of the book that things get really interesting and weird, as Russell allows himself to speculate about the fundamental nature of reality, taking for granted general relativity, quantum mechanics and the causal theory of perception. Remember this is well before Schrodinger’s cat: the famous problems of interpreting the quantum world haven’t even been clearly stated yet.Perhaps the most significant chapter is “Physics and Neutral Monism”, which outlines Russell’s neutral monism: the view that the “mental” and the “physical” are just different arrangements of the same basic stuff, namely events. A percept is an event in the brain that is linked by causal laws to other events in the brain, and is in this sense “mental”. But it is also linked by causal laws to other events outside the brain, and is in this sense “physical”. Percepts “fit into the same causal scheme as physical events, and are not known to have any intrinsic character that physical events cannot have” (p. 384).Why is this “neutral monism” and not physicalism? Because we need to allow that we have knowledge by acquaintance of the intrinsic qualities of our percepts, and this knowledge lies outside of physics, which is concerned only with structure. Physics gives us the “causal skeleton” of the world, but not the intrinsic qualities that fill the skeleton. Russell gives an early version of the “Knowledge Argument” when defending this idea, writing: “It is obvious that a man who can see knows things which a blind man cannot know; but a blind man can know the whole of physics. Thus the knowledge which other men have and he has not is not part of physics” (p. 389).Do events outside human brains also have intrinsic qualities? Russell suggests that external events may resemble mental events more than they resemble “traditional billiard-balls”. He doesn’t explicitly endorse panpsychism, instead professing agnosticism about the intrinsic quality of events outside human brains. We might have reason to posit such qualities, but we can never know what they are like. These speculations are the inspiration for the contemporary version of panpsychism (or “panprotopsychism”) known as “Russellian monism”.

⭐The book may well be considered an excellent treatment of the subject by those more knowledgeable than me , but it isn’t for the tyro, I can tell you. As such, it is very different from some of Russell’s other books in this series aimed at a layman audience and should be avoided without a good degree in physics or mathematics, as quantum theory – and its equations – loom large.

⭐Impressive work by Russell. Dry as ever, but thoroughly informative.

⭐completely satisfied

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