| As one of the representatives of the20th century analytic philosophy, Russell has made remarkable achievements in the field of mathematical logic. His logic mathematical was known to the world, however, he did not stay in the specialized field of mathematics. He nearly simultaneously turned his eyes to the field of human understandings that behave the theory of knowledge. As he said in My Philosophical Development, that "my philosophical development may be divided into various stages according to the problems with which I have been concerned and the men whose work has influenced me. There is only one constant preoccupation:I have throughout been anxious to discover how much we can be said to know and with what degree of certainty or doubtfulness."1From the above, then you can see, Russell’s labor on the foundations of mathematics can be seen for our knowledge to provide some epistemological basis.However, Russell in this regard seemed to move towards the extreme. On the one hand, he emphasized "the doctrine of external relations" in the Principia Mathematica, operating "Ockham’s razor" to remove all the concepts of entities and metaphysics. On the other hand, in epistemology, he no longer insisted the material and spiritual, subject and object be the basic constituent stuff of the world. On the contrary, they are constructions composed of events by logical principles. The world is a collection of all kinds of propositions formed by some proposition functions.Russell’s epistemology has been changed from the dualism of mind and matter to the neutral monism. Logical analysis methods in his philosophy played a decisive role. This paper attempts to start from the opposition to subjective consciousness existed as the ground of understandings, from which Russell finally gave up the traditional dichotomy of mind and matter, and under the way of the logical analysis applied to the entity theory,conclude why Russell think of the cosmic being the result of the logical structure. |
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