Bertranda Russella koncepcja monizmu neutralnego

Bertrand Russell's neutral monism, a metaphysical view that the fundamental constituents of reality are neither mental nor physical but neutral, evolved through three phases. Initially Russell rejected it due to epistemological commitments. In The Analysis of Mind he proposed a first neutral monism with deflationary theories of object and subject. A second neutral monism, from 1927, introduced intrinsic and extrinsic properties. The author argues Russell's agnostic metaphysics is too reductive for dualists and too mysterious for materialists, and may be more epistemological than metaphysical, potentially misconstrued within the Cartesian mind-matter framework.

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Abstract

The metaphysical view of Bertrand Russell, called neutral monism, is not widely known today, although its impact on the contemporary debate over mind-body problem is clearly visible. The aim of this paper is to answer the question: what was Russell’s neutral monism? Firstly, I present the views of Russell’s predecessors – Ernst Mach and William James. Then, I discuss Russell’s own thought which can be divided into three phases. The initial phase is the rejection of neutral monism (mainly because of Russell’s commitments to epistemology). The second phase – I call it the first neutral monism – appears in The Analysis of Mind, where he proposes a deflationary theory of the object and the subject. The last, third phase – called the second neutral monism, initiated in 1927 in The Analysis of Matter and An Outline of Philosophy – introduces the notions of intrinsic and extrinsic properties. Finally, I suggest that the agnostic metaphysics of Russell is too reductive for a dualist and too mysterious for a materialist. However, it might be also true that Russell’s view is more epistemological than metaphysical, and the frames of (misleading) Cartesian dictionary of mind/matter may be too narrow for neutral monism to be pertinently interpreted.