∞ Bertie

Bertie and Other Philosophers ..

Bertie's Politics of Logic ..

Bertie's Teapot ..

Bertrand Russell: Four Motivations ..

Bertrand Russell - Living in the Atomic Age ..

Conversation with Bertrand Russell (1952) ..

Political Blame Game ..

Russell's Teapot Thought Experiment ..

Why Bertie's Teapot? ..

Bertie's Teapot

Why I Am Not a Christian by Bertrand Russell > .

Russell's teapot is an analogy, formulated by the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), to illustrate that the philosophic burden of proof lies upon a person making unfalsifiable claims, rather than shifting the burden of disproof to others.

Russell specifically applied his analogy in the context of religion. He wrote that if he were to assert, without offering proof, that a teapot, too small to be seen by telescopes, orbits the Sun somewhere in space between the Earth and Mars, he could not expect anyone to believe him solely because his assertion could not be proven wrong.

Russell's teapot is still invoked in discussions concerning the NON-existence of God, and has had influence in various fields and media.

In an article titled "Is There a God?" commissioned, but never published, by Illustrated magazine in 1952, Russell wrote:

Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.

In 1958, Russell elaborated on the analogy:

I ought to call myself an agnostic; but, for all practical purposes, I am an atheist. I do not think the existence of the Christian God any more probable than the existence of the Gods of Olympus or Valhalla. To take another illustration: nobody can prove that there is not between the Earth and Mars a china teapot revolving in an elliptical orbit, but nobody thinks this sufficiently likely to be taken into account in practice. I think the Christian God just as unlikely.   

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot .
? https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=bertrand+russell ?

Bertie's Politics of Logic

The politics of logic: Should philosophy express the national character of a people? Bertrand Russell’s ‘scientific’ philosophy was a bulwark against nationalism

In Bertrand Russell’s now-legendary book Our Knowledge of the External World (1914), Russell sought to model "a new ‘scientific’ method for doing philosophy that made the logical analysis of propositions fundamental. This logic-centric style would come to define what we now know as analytic philosophy."

Bernard Bosanquet, an ageing titan of British idealism, called his November 1914, inaugural address to the Aristotelian Society’s 36th session, ‘Science and Philosophy’. It was a broadside on Bertrand Russell’s book.

"Bosanquet’s opening complaint about Russell’s methodology was, surprisingly, political. He argued that the ‘scientific’ methodology would inevitably make philosophy ‘cosmopolitan in character and free from special national qualities’. Since logic, and science more generally, respects no political or cultural boundaries, Russell’s philosophy could never function as a distinctive expression of a people. This was a problem for Bosanquet. He held ‘that philosophy, being, like language, art, and poetry, a product of the whole man, is a thing which would forfeit some of its essence if it were to lose its national quality’. British idealism for Britons, and German idealism for Germans."
...
"The cosmopolitanism that Bosanquet thought implicit in Russell’s philosophical methodology was no illusion. Two weeks prior to Bosanquet’s attack at the Society, Russell had delivered a lecture at Oxford that would be published under the title ‘On Scientific Method in Philosophy’. Today it is remembered as a call to arms for logical analysis and it largely restated, in a more pointed way, the methodological outlook of Our Knowledge. Russell’s essay is not overtly political. And yet privately, Russell told one colleague that the talk ‘was partly inspired by disgust at the universal outburst of “righteousness” in all nations since the war began. It seems the essence of virtue is persecution, and it has given me a disgust of all ethical notions, which evidently are chiefly useful as an excuse for murder.’ To another colleague, he described the lecture as ‘inspired by the bloodthirstiness of professors here and in Germany. I gave it at Oxford, and it produced all the disgust I had hoped.’"
...
"Russell’s suggestion is that ethical philosophy offers little more than self-serving argument to justify nationalistic violence. What is more, Russell had held up Bosanquet himself as an example of the kind of moralising metaphysics he meant to repudiate. In private, Russell referred to the essay as ‘Philosophers and Pigs’.

The political anxieties at play begin to make sense when one bears in mind the timing of all of this. Bosanquet’s attack was delivered in the midst of the earthquake that was Britain’s entry into the Great War. The quake didn’t just shake soldiers on the battlefield. It also shook intellectuals, and would permanently change the direction of abstract pursuits that might seem highly remote from the concerns of warfare, like epistemology and metaphysics. For Russell, a crucial spark of the violence was nationalism, and he regarded scientific philosophy as a tool for opposing it."
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Russell's theoretical antidote to the irrational, sectarian vitriol between European nations was to try to show how logic could function as an international language that could be used impartially and dispassionately to adjudicate disputes. His theoretical antidote was, in other words, analytic philosophy....
Russell didn’t intend logic to become the language of literature and poetry, much less to destroy those practices. But he very much intended his ‘scientific’ methodology to destroy a conception of philosophy as an articulation of a ‘national mind’.

The connection between Russell’s antinationalism and his metaphilosophy comes out sharply in his political writing of the era. In April 1915, he was again railing against the role philosophers were playing in promoting nationalism:

Leibniz, writing to a French correspondent at a time when France and Hanover were at war, speaks of ‘this war, in which philosophy takes no interest’. … We have travelled far since those days. In modern times, philosophers, professors and intellectuals generally undertake willingly to provide their respective governments with those ingenious distortions and those subtle untruths by which it is made to appear that all good is on one side and all wickedness on the other … I cannot but think that the men of learning, by allowing partiality to colour their thoughts and words, have missed the opportunity of performing a service to mankind for which their training should have specially fitted them. The truth, whatever it may be, is the same in England, France, and Germany, in Russia and in Austria. It will not adapt itself to national needs: it is in its essence neutral.

 ...
The UK entered the war August 4th, 1914. By the end of the week, the House of Commons passed the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA), which gave the government broad wartime powers – including censorship. In 1916, Russell would be dismissed from his post at Trinity College, Cambridge, following his conviction under DORA (and thanks in part to a campaign at the university led by another British idealist, J M E McTaggart). Russell spent six months in jail for his outspoken pacifism.

https://aeon.co/essays/philosophy-at-war-nationalism-and-logical-analysis .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_entry_into_World_War_I .

Bertrand Russell - Living in the Atomic Age

Bertrand Russell (1953) - Living in the Atomic Age - PhOD > .