Recent Developments in European Thought by Various
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page 31 of 310 (10%)
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the production and distribution of 'wealth', or the stability of various
forms of government, to burden themselves with this inquiry in addition to their other tasks. They may fairly be allowed to leave the construction of logic to others. But the man who makes it the business of his life to get back to ultimate first principles must plainly be a logician, though he need not be a specialist in biology or economics or 'sociology'. One great advantage which our children should have over their parents as students of Philosophy is that the last half-century has been one of unprecedented advance in the study of logic. In the 'logic of relations', founded by De Morgan, carried out further in the third volume of Ernst Schröder's _Algebra der Logik_, and made still more precise in the earliest sections of the _Principia Mathematica_ of Whitehead and Russell, we now possess the most potent weapon of intellectual analysis ever yet devised by man. We must further remark that the serious pursuit of any kind of science implies not only that there _are_ truths, but that some of them, at least, can be _known_ by man. Hence there arises a problem which is not quite the same as that of logic. What _is_ the relation we mean to speak of when we talk of 'knowing' something, and what conditions must be fulfilled in order that a proposition may not only be true but be known by us to be true? The very generality of this problem marks it out as one which belongs to what I have been all along calling Philosophy. (We must be careful to note that the problem does not belong to the 'special science' of psychology. Psychology aims at telling us how particular thoughts and trains of thought arise in an individual mind, but it has nothing to say on the question which of our thoughts give us 'knowledge' and which do not. The 'possibility of knowledge' has to be presupposed by the psychologist as a pre-condition of his particular investigations exactly as it is presupposed by the physicist, the botanist, or the |
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