Bertrand Russell on Other Philosophers

Posted by Ali Reda | Posted in | Posted on 5/28/2014

On Nietzsche
His "noble" man—who is himself in day-dreams—is a being wholly devoid of sympathy, ruthless, cunning, cruel, concerned only with his own power. King Lear, on the verge of madness, says: "I will do such things—What they are yet I know not—but they shall be The terror of the earth." This is Nietzsche's philosophy in a nutshell ~ Russell, ibid. p. 767
 On Wittgenstein
"I love him & feel he will solve the problems I am too old to solve ... He is the young man one hopes for."
He used to come to see me every evening at midnight, and pace up and down the room like a wild beast for three hours in agitated silence. Once I said to him: 'Are you thinking about logic, or about your sins?' 'Both', he replied, and continued his pacing. I did not like to suggest it was time for bed, for it seemed probable both to him and to me that on leaving me he would commit suicide. 
On Heidegger
Highly eccentric in its terminology, his philosophy is extremely obscure. One cannot help suspecting that language is here running riot. As with much else in Existentialism, this is a psychological observation made to pass for logic

On George Berkeley
He maintained that material objects only exist through being perceived. To the objection that, in that case, a tree, for instance, would cease to exist if no one was looking at it, he replied that God always perceives everything; if there were no God, what we take to be material objects would have a jerky life, suddenly leaping into being when we look at them; but as it is, owing to God’s perceptions, trees and rocks and stones have an existence as continuous as common sense supposes. This is, in his opinion, a weighty argument for the existence of God. 

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