• People often suppose philosophy to be of no practical significance. Part of Russell's purpose in his opening essay is to demonstrate the important links between philosophical views – even on very abstruse questions such as whether there are triangles – and attitudes to social life and politics.
• Russell lived for 100 years, and wrote books continuously for 70 of them. At the time of these essays, the Second World War had just ended and the Cold War was just on, and so comparisons between democratic and totalitarian forms of social organization were subjects of vivid interest. The first main thesis Russell defends in what you've read for today is philosophies that reject empiricism encourage anti-democratic views. He singles out Plato and the 19 th -century German philosopher Hegel in this regard. This will be our first subject of discussion.
• Notice, first, that from the fact that an idea has consequences we don't like, this in no way shows that idea to be false. It makes absolutely no difference to the truth of an idea whether we like it or its consequences. So you can't try to refute Plato or Hegel by showing that they make things easier for tyrants. However, the question of whether, and why, different philosophies lead to different political views is obviously interesting in itself, because we want to know where different political views come from.
• Russell argues that empiricism comports naturally with democratic attitudes. His main reason for this is that, for an empiricist, no truths can be certain, all are revisable , and it's always possible that someone else has chanced upon better evidence than we have. Thus they, rather than us, might be right, and we should want their view to be aired for our own good.
• Russell often uses the word `liberalism' more or less interchangeably with `democracy'. We should spend a few minutes on the word `liberalism', because in American political life it has come to have a very strange meaning that it has never held at other times, and that it has in no other countries. After we discuss this, I'll tell you what `liberalism' means in South Africa – where it has another, very different but equally strange, meaning – and then we'll see if this comparison leads us to any general conclusions by doing some analysis.
• “The kind of knowledge that gives most help in solving [political and social] problems is a wide survey of human life, in the past as well as in the present, and an appreciation of the sources of misery or contentment as they appear in history” (p. 32).
• “Philosophy has had from its earliest days two different objects which were believed to be closely interrelated. On the one hand, it aimed at a theoretical understanding of the structure of the world; on the other hand, it tried to discover and inculcate the best possible way of life” (p. 34).
• With respect to its relations to science: philosophy and science simply shade into one another; there is no sharp boundary between them. Once a problem has become well understood we tend to call it `scientific'; earlier, we call it `philosophical'. But this is largely a matter of semantics.
• “The demand for certainly is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice” (p. 38). Dogmatism caused the murder, in the twentieth century alone, of a minimum 180 million people – that is, 3/4 of the present population of the US.
• “But if philosophy is to serve a practical purpose it must not teach mere skepticism, fir while the dogmatist is harmful, the skeptic is useless. Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dispute is certainty ” (p. 38).
• On ethical living, Russell maintains first that philosophy counsels one to try to believe what will actually survive assault by honest argument, rather than what other people happened to cause one to believe. Ethical arguments for this are given throughout these essays.
• However, to balance out all this praise of philosophy, in `Philosophy's Ulterior Motives' Russell makes fun of various great philosophers, and of philosophers in general. (Only Hume is written of with full respect.) In particular, philosophers are lambasted for typically imagining that they can establish important truths merely by thinking very hard (as opposed to doing experiments). Is it possible to simultaneously hold both these attitudes? Yes – there is no contradiction in believing both that philosophy is very important, and that it is often very silly.