Bertrand Russell's final chapter

The final chapter of Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy is a rather perfunctory comment on 'the Philosophy of Logical Analysis'- a subject Russell had quit over a decade previously.

IN philosophy ever since the time of Pythagoras there has been an opposition between the men whose thought was mainly inspired by mathematics and those who were more influenced by the empirical sciences.

Not really. The mathsy guys tried to fit what appeared to be the case for the empirical sciences into their system while the engineers might go in the opposite direction. Philosophy was about open questions in the latter- as Socrates said.

Plato, Thomas Aquinas, Spinoza, and Kant belong to what may be called the mathematical party;

But they weren't mathematicians. Descartes and Leibniz did make contributions to Math but were much more than mathematicians.

Democritus, Aristotle, and the modern empiricists from Locke onwards, belong to the opposite party.

No. They were simply wrong. Empiricists know that all current Philosophy will be discovered to be shit as other disciplines gain evidence that closes currently 'open questions'. Interestingly, it was mathematics itself which closed the question of whether it could be reducible to logic in a manner adverse to Russell.

In our day a school of philosophy has arisen which sets to work to eliminate Pythagoreanism from the principles of mathematics,

Nothing can prevent anything at all from being read into the 'principles' of anything whatsoever.  

and to combine empiricism with an interest in the deductive parts of human knowledge.

This just means being able to construct more elaborate theories for which some crucial experiment may be devised as technology improves. But this shifts the focus to technology or 'applied' science. 

The aims of this school are less spectacular than those of most philosophers in the past, but some of its achievements are as solid as those of the men of science.

Sadly, the reverse would prove to be the case. Philosophy was already becoming adversely selective of imbeciles. Solid epistemic achievements only remain solid if shit is not piled upon top of them.  

The origin of this philosophy is in the achievements of mathematicians who set to work to purge their subject of fallacies and slipshod reasoning.

They failed. Intensional fallacies we will always have with us. One man's slipshod reasoning is another man's axiom system which may be very useful in some field.  

The great mathematicians of the seventeenth century were optimistic and anxious for quick results;

They had other jobs. They did math as part of their other projects. Nothing wrong in that at all. 

consequently they left the foundations of analytical geometry and the infinitesimal calculus insecure.

Just as they remain today.  

Leibniz believed in actual infinitesimals,

which are plenty useful in Robinson's nonstandard analysis.  

but although this belief suited his metaphysics it had no sound basis in mathematics.

It now has a sound enough base.  

Weierstrass, soon after the middle of the nineteenth century, showed how to establish the calculus without infinitesimals, and thus at last made it logically secure.

This assumes Cauchy's sum theorem was wrong. Lakatos argued that his notion of convergence everywhere is really more like Weierstrass's notion of uniform convergence than point-wise convergence, and the theorem as he intended it is true.

Next came Georg Cantor, who developed the theory of continuity and infinite number. "Continuity" had been, until he defined it, a vague word, convenient for philosophers like Hegel, who wished to introduce metaphysical muddles into mathematics

Liebniz's law of continuity is important. Robinson says it is what, in model theory, is called a transfer principle (which states that all statements of some language that are true for some structure are true for another structure)

. Cantor gave a precise significance to the word, and showed that continuity, as he defined it, was the concept needed by mathematicians and physicists.

This just meant giving extensions to intensions. But different extensions serve different purposes. None will simultaneously be useful, consistent and complete.  

By this means a great deal of mysticism, such as that of Bergson, was rendered antiquated.

Not really. The Universe might actually be a hologram.  

Cantor also overcame the long-standing logical puzzles about infinite number.

Which generated things more puzzling yet. 

Take the series of whole numbers from 1 onwards; how many of them are there? Clearly the number is not finite. Up to a thousand, there are a thousand numbers; up to a million, a million. Whatever finite number you mention, there are evidently more numbers than that, because from 1 up to the number in question there are just that number of numbers, and then there are others that are greater. The number of finite whole numbers must, therefore, be an infinite number.

This does not follow. The number of something it is difficult to count is an uncountable or unknowable number. However, what Cantor did was to establish a method of counting which defined a notion of cardinality. This proved very useful. 

But now comes a curious fact: The number of even numbers must be the same as the number of all whole numbers. Consider the two rows: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, . . . . 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, . . . . There is one entry in the lower row for every one in the top row; therefore the number of terms in the two rows must be the same, although the lower row consists of only half the terms in the top row.  Leibniz, who noticed this, thought it a contradiction, and concluded that, though there are infinite collections, there are no infinite numbers.

What was missing was a notion of cardinality based on the diagonal operation noted above.

Georg Cantor, on the contrary, boldly denied that it is a contradiction. He was right; it is only an oddity.

It is fundamental.  

Georg Cantor defined an "infinite" collection as one which has parts containing as many terms as the whole collection contains. On this basis he was able to build up a most interesting mathematical theory of infinite numbers, thereby taking into the realm of exact logic a whole region formerly given over to mysticism and confusion.

Interestingly, Brouwer- who might well be considered a mystic- reacted by creating a different type of logic. Indeed, there will be many 'exact' logics and, speaking generally, anything really useful in the one can be duplicated in another. Thus logic didn't greatly matter. Indeed, it might require a computer to find errors or do proof checking. 

The next man of importance was Frege, who published his first work in 1879, and his definition of "number" in 1884; but, in spite of the epoch-making nature of his discoveries,

nothing 'epochal' occurred. Genuine discoveries reveal new facts or enable new tech. Frege & Russell merely detected and then reduplicated very ancient intensional fallacies. By contrast, Norbert Weiner's work was useful. As a kid, he showed that the theory of relations does not require any axioms or primitive notions distinct from those of set theory. Philosophy is useless. Computers are useful. 

he remained wholly without recognition until I drew attention to him in 1903. It is remarkable that, before Frege, every definition of number that had been suggested contained elementary logical blunders.

This was certainly the case with Frege's definition. A concept's extension may be a number that is only a number if it isn't a number. Weiner, at the age of 10, was on the right track. Everything is an approximation not some sort of magical 'extension'.  

It was customary to identify "number" with "plurality.

Only among shitheads teaching stupid shite. 

" But an instance of "number" is a particular number, say 3, and an instance of 3 is a particular triad. The triad is a plurality, but the class of all triads--which Frege identified with the number 3--is a plurality of pluralities, and number in general, of which 3 is an instance, is a plurality of pluralities of pluralities.

Imbecilic drivel. Three is just a solution to a particular coordination or discoordination game. Believing in the Trinity might keep you safe on one shore of the Mediterranean while getting you killed on the other.  

The elementary grammatical mistake of confounding this with the simple plurality of a given triad

An elementary grammatical mistake confounds a noun with a verb or saying 'We likes cat'  

made the whole philosophy of number, before Frege, a tissue of nonsense in the strictest sense of the term "nonsense."

But Frege's shite was just as useless and stupid.  

From Frege's work it followed that arithmetic, and pure mathematics generally, is nothing but a prolongation of deductive logic.

No. Some types of Arithmetic can have a representation in some types of logic. More generally, logicism is a failed program though the bulk of extant math can, using extra-logical axioms, be brought within its domain.

This disproved Kant's theory that arithmetical propositions are "synthetic" and involve a reference to time.

No. That theory can't be disproved. It is merely as foolish and useless as any theory of Frege or Russell's.  

The development of pure mathematics from logic was set forth in detail in Principia Mathematica, by Whitehead and myself. It gradually became clear that a great part of philosophy can be reduced to something that may be called "syntax," though the word has to be used in a somewhat wider sense than has hitherto been customary.

Philosophy is shit and shit can be equated to anything at all by shitheads.  

Some men, notably Carnap, have advanced the theory that all philosophical problems are really syntactical, and that, when errors in syntax are avoided, a philosophical problem is thereby either solved or shown to be insoluble. I think this is an overstatement, but  there can be no doubt that the utility of philosophical syntax in relation to traditional problems is very great.

but those 'traditional problems' were a wank. Why be useful to wankers? They will jizz into their own eyes regardless.  

I will illustrate its utility by a brief explanation of what is called the theory of descriptions. By a "description" I mean a phrase such as "The present President of the United States,"

which couldn't have been Obama- coz he was born in Nairobi, right?- nor Biden- coz Tump actually won the election.  

in which a person or thing is designated, not by name, but by some property which is supposed or known to be peculiar to him or it. Such phrases had given a lot of trouble. Suppose I say "The golden mountain does not exist," and suppose you ask "What is it that does not exist?" It would seem that, if I say "It is the golden mountain," I am attributing some sort of existence to it. Obviously I am not making the same statement as if I said, "The round square does not exist." This seemed to imply that the golden mountain is one thing and the round square is another, although neither exists. The theory of descriptions was designed to meet this and other difficulties. According to this theory, when a statement containing a phrase of the form "the so-and-so" is rightly analysed,

if it were, it would be seen that no fucking 'descriptions' are involved. Words are about how they are used- i.e. pragmatics- and that has to do with coordination or discoordination games. Suppose 'golden mountain' means the head of the League of Assassins whom Batman is trying to track down. Then Robin discovers that there is no such person. Actually, the League of Assassins is just a name that various unconnected gangs have given themselves. Still, if capturing 'the Golden Mountain' has a good effect, why not claim to have done so, whether he exists or not?

the phrase "the so-and so" disappears. For example, take the statement "Scott was the author of Waverley."

Why not 'Waverley was the author of Scott'  because in subsequent works the poet referred to himself as 'the author of Waverley'?  

The theory interprets this statement as saying: "One and only one man wrote Waverley, and that man was Scott."

If it is your theory it can interpret anything in any way you like. 

Or, more fully: "There is an entity c such that the statement 'x wrote Waverley' is true if x is c and false otherwise; moreover c is Scott." The first part of this, before the word "moreover," is defined as meaning: "The author of Waverley exists (or existed or will exist)." Thus "The golden mountain does not exist" means: "There is no entity c such that 'x is golden and mountainous is true when x is c, but not otherwise." With this definition the puzzle as to what is meant when we say "The golden mountain does not exist" disappears.

The problem here is the existential predicate. Something may exist as a 'Meinongian object' (which does not belong in Being) whereas nothing may fit the description of it. I may say, 'today I saw the snow clad mountain by Dawn's early light. It was golden. This is the golden mountain mentioned by the poets!' You may reply, 'technically, that isn't a mountain. It is merely a hill. Also it was more roseate in colour than golden.' Taking umbrage, I describe you as a big fat roseate hill of shite. This causes you to cease to exist. 

"Existence," according to this theory, can only be asserted of descriptions.

Yet there are things which can't be described because they are inaccessible to any describer but which do exist. Equally a 'non-constructive' existence proof in Math may be utter nonsense because if the proof is valid it must also be the case that all cats are dogs.  

We can say "The author of Waverley exists," but to say "Scott exists" is bad grammar, or rather bad syntax.

No it isn't. It may not sound idiomatic but it is perfectly permissible. We may say 'nothing which exists can be wholly bad' in order to argue that Scott can't be an utter scoundrel.  

This clears up two millennia of muddle-headedness about "existence," beginning with Plato Theaetetus.

If your profession is to talk nonsense, 'clearing up' muddle-headedness involves talking stupid garbage. Mathsy garbage is still garbage.  

One result of the work we have been considering is to dethrone mathematics from the lofty place that it has occupied since Pythagoras and Plato,

who were ignorant cunts who died long ago. Who gives a fuck what they had enthroned?  

and to destroy the presumption against empiricism which has been derived from it.

Roger Bacon had done that for England many centuries ago.  

Mathematical knowledge, it is true, is not obtained by induction from experience; our reason for believing that 2 and 2 are 4 is not that we have so often found, by observation, that one couple and another couple together make a quartet.

Russell's reason for believing shite like the above was that he was writing, talking, and teaching shite. By pretending he had made some important knowledge to 'Reason' he could peddle crazy political solutions- e.g. surrendering to Hitler because he is so sweet and nice- to virtue signalling nutters. 

In this sense, mathematical knowledge is still not empirical.

It is empirical enough if it yields approximations which are empirically verified. Norbert Weiner had worked this out by the age of 10. Russell never got that far. During the Great War he was sent to jail because he was writing pamphlets urging the US not to help defeat the Kaiser. What a cunt!

But it is also not a priori knowledge about the world. It is, in fact, merely verbal knowledge. "3" means "2 + 1," and "4" means "3 + 1." Hence it follows (though the proof is long) that "4" means the same as "2 + 2."

Sadly that 'long proof' meant only that the guys providing it were useless tossers.  By the time the second edition came out, Logicism as a program had been superseded. Russell, it seems, did meet Godel later on, but does not appear to have understood him. I suppose this was around the time he was writing the following shite.

Thus mathematical knowledge ceases to be mysterious.

Plenty of mathematical knowledge is mysterious. Hamming has a good article on this. Sometimes things which we think are facts of the world- e.g. uncertainty- are facts about our mathematics. But Hamming also wrote a book on Coding and Information Theory where 'conventional integers are used for labels, and real numbers are used for probabilities; but otherwise all the arithmetic and algebra that occurs in the book, and there is a lot of both, has the rule that 1+1=0.'

It is all of the same nature as the "great truth" that there are three feet in a yard.

No. Mathematical truths have 'naturality'- i.e. are non arbitrary. The yard was defined as the length between an English King's nose and the thumb of his outstretched arm. That was arbitrary.  

Physics, as well as pure mathematics, has supplied material for the philosophy of logical analysis.

Actually, Einstein was an odd type of physicist who was less excited about the experimental verification of his theory than he was by pure math and even philosophy. But philosophy became adversely selective of stupidity. It may be that the pure math requirement for Natural and empirical Social Science will fall as computers and A.Is do the heavy lifting. This may mean more rapid implementation of technological applications which in turn means more rapid performance of 'crucial experiments' or the making measurable of parameters which enable us to differentiate between currently 'observationally equivalent' theories. Where does this leave philosophy? The answer is provided by the likes of Amia Srinivasan and Jason Stanley. Wokeness and Grievance Studies will be its fate. But then Russell was beforehand in embracing the stupidest possible type of politics even during the Great War. Frege, more sadly, seems to have been a sort of proto-Nazi. Gentzen- 'Logic's lost Genius'- was an actual Nazi. 

at is important to the philosopher in the theory of relativity is the substitution of space-time for space and time. Common sense thinks of the physical world as composed of "things" which persist through a certain period of time and move in space.

That's good enough for most purposes. The manifold we inhabit is locally Euclidean.  

Philosophy and physics developed the notion of "thing" into that of "material substance," and thought of material substance as consisting of particles, each very small, and each persisting throughout all time. Einstein substituted events for particles; each event had to each other a relation called "interval," which could be analysed in various ways into a timeelement and a space-element. The choice between these various ways was arbitrary, and no one of them was theoretically preferable to any other.

It wasn't arbitrary but based on uncorrelated asymmetries- e.g. your occupying a particular light-cone rather than some other which was accelerating with respect to yours.  

Given two events A and B, in different regions, it might happen that according to one convention they were simultaneous, according to another A was earlier than B, and according to yet another B was earlier than A.

But your own 'convention' would be provided for you by your frame of reference. All Einstein was saying was that no frame was 'privileged' with respect to any other.  

No physical facts correspond to these different conventions. From all this it seems to follow that events, not particles, must be the "stuff" of physics.

Physics just kept coming up with more and more elementary particles. 

What has been thought of as a particle will have to be thought of as a series of events.

Or not. What mattered was whether there was a better prediction from a better Structural Causal Model.  

The series of events that replaces a particle has certain important physical properties,

predicates. We don't know the 'properties' of events. For that we have to go back to particles.  

and therefore demands our attention; but it has no more substantiality than any other series of events that we might arbitrarily single out.

Nope. Neutrinos have mass. It appears they can interact with photons.

Thus "matter" is not part of the ultimate material of the world, but merely a convenient way of collecting events into bundles.

It is even more convenient not to bother with bundling.  

Quantum theory reinforces this conclusion,

Nope. It can support vastly different conclusions- including the obvious one, viz. that such conclusions aren't worth jumping to or hopping to or reaching by any other means of locomotion.  

but its chief philosophical importance

discovered by Zeno and abandoned as useless 

is that it regards physical phenomena as possibly discontinuous.

There was a time when open problems in Math or Physics had a canonical representation in Philosophy. That ceased to be the case decades ago even before the subject became adversely selective. 

It suggests that, in an atom (interpreted as above), a certain state of affairs persists for a certain time, and then suddenly is replaced by a finitely different state of affairs. Continuity of motion, which had always been assumed, appears to have been a mere prejudice. The philosophy appropriate to quantum theory, however, has not yet been adequately developed. I suspect that it will demand even more radical departures from the traditional doctrine of space and time than those demanded by the theory of relativity.

As Natural Science became more and more expensive, the only demand made of it was economic. Nobody gave a toss if some elderly pedant complained that he didn't understand this or that new-fangled theory not to mention that Jazz music the youngsters seem to like.

While physics has been making matter less material, psychology has been making mind less mental.

Psychology could pay for itself by using sex to get men to buy a more expensive brand of dog food. Philosophy was a Ponzi scheme suckering kids too stupid to become anything but professors of stupid shit.  

We had occasion in a former chapter to compare the association of ideas with the conditioned reflex.

Animals incapable of forming ideas nevertheless may show 'conditioned reflexes'.  

The latter, which has replaced the former, is obviously much more physiological. (This is only one illustration; I do not wish to exaggerate the scope of the conditioned reflex.) Thus from both ends physics and psychology have been approaching each other, and making more possible the doctrine of "neutral monism" suggested by William James's criticism of "consciousness."

The latter is useful. The former is useless.  

The distinction of mind and matter came into philosophy from religion,

religion is useful- if Heaven exists. Philosophy is useless in either case.  

although, for a long time, it seemed to have valid grounds. I think that both mind and matter are merely convenient ways of grouping events. Some single events, I should admit, belong only to material groups, but others belong to both kinds of groups, and are therefore at once mental and material.

So what? Who cares how some stupid pedants classify things? No doubt, from the religious point of view, it matters if you fucked your neighbour's ass or donkey in a mental, rather than material way, but religion needs to get paid by wankers because those who are getting laid have spent all their money towards that end.  

This doctrine effects a great simplification in our picture of the structure of the world.

Pictures of the world don't matter. Tech does.  

Modern physics and physiology throw a new light upon the ancient problem of perception.

There was an ancient problem of starving to death or getting eaten by lions or being killed or enslaved. There was no big problem with perception.  

If there is to be anything that can be called "perception," it must be in some degree an effect of the object perceived, and it must more or less resemble the object if it is to be a source of knowledge of the object.

Perceiving a rope as a snake may have survival value if snakes are ubiquitous and lethal.  

The first requisite can only be fulfilled if there are causal chains which are, to a greater or less extent, independent of the rest of the world.

As Norbert Weiner understood, approximations should err on the side of caution. Ex unge leonem- seeing the claw of the lion, if lions are common, is a good reason to run away before you get eaten.  

According to physics, this is the case. Lightwaves travel from the sun to the earth, and in doing so obey their own laws. This is only roughly true. Einstein has shown that light-rays are affected by gravitation.

Newton's light corpuscles had mass and were affected by gravity.  

When they reach our atmosphere, they suffer refraction, and some are more scattered than others. When they reach a human eye, all sorts of things happen which would not happen elsewhere, ending up with what we call "seeing the sun." But although the sun of our visual experience is very different from the sun of the astronomer,

it is the same object.  

it is still a source of knowledge as to the latter, because "seeing the sun" differs from "seeing the moon" in ways that are causally connected with the difference between the astronomer's sun and the astronomer's moon.

The sun and moon are the same for astronomers and accountants and actuaries.  

What we can know of physical objects in this way, however, is only certain abstract properties of structure.

That's the one thing we can never know till all things are known. Approximations are useful for specific purposes but pretending you know something abstract about another abstraction isn't useful. 

We can know that the sun is round in a sense, though not quite the sense in which what we see is round; but we have no reason to suppose that it is bright or warm, because physics can account for its seeming so without supposing that it is so.

Even in England, when the Sun comes out, it warms us. We know the Sun is hot and round. The Moon is round but cool. It occurs to me that maybe Russell was simply stupid or was just phoning it in with this book.  

Our knowledge of the physical world, therefore, is only abstract and mathematical.

No. Our knowledge of the physical world is useful. That's what makes it knowledge. 

Modern analytical empiricism, of which I have been giving an outline, differs from that of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume by its incorporation of mathematics and its development of a powerful logical technique.

which are either based on useful 'approximations' or are wholly meaningless 

It is thus able, in regard to certain problems, to achieve definite answers,

e.g. philosophy is definitely useless. 

which have the quality of science rather than of philosophy.

Husserl, to his credit, had decided otherwise a decade previously. He wrote ' “Philosophy as science, as serious, rigorous, indeed apodictically rigorous science -- the dream is over' 

It has the advantage, as compared with the philosophies of the systembuilders, of being able to tackle its problems one at a time, instead of having to invent at one stroke a block theory of the whole universe.

It can generate intensional fallacies one at a time so as to provide itself with 'busy-work'.  

Its methods, in this respect, resemble those of science. I have no doubt that, in so far as philosophical knowledge is possible, it is by such methods that it must be sought;

by useless tossers. In so far as it is possible for me to have sex with She-Hulk, it is only through closing my eyes and wanking.  

I have also no doubt that, by these methods, many ancient problems are completely soluble. There remains, however, a vast field, traditionally included in philosophy, where scientific methods are inadequate. This field includes ultimate questions of value; science alone, for example, cannot prove that it is bad to enjoy the infliction of cruelty.

Because it isn't bad to do so in some cases.  

Whatever can be known, can be known by means of science; but things which are legitimately matters of feeling lie outside its province.

Nope. Emotions may merely be 'Darwinian algorithms of the mind'.  

Philosophy, throughout its history, has consisted of two parts inharmoniously blended: on the one hand a theory as to the nature of the world, on the other an ethical or political doctrine as to the best way of living. The failure to separate these two with sufficient clarity has been a source of much confused thinking.

You can't stop confused people confusing each other by pretending to think.  

Philosophers, from Plato to William James, have

been useless 

allowed their opinions as to the constitution of the universe to be influenced by the desire for edification: knowing, as they supposed, what beliefs would make men virtuous,  they have invented arguments, often very sophistical, to prove that these beliefs are true.

Russel is inventing an argument here which he ought to have known had already been refuted in his own field. 

For my part I reprobate this kind of bias, both on moral and on intellectual grounds. Morally, a philosopher who uses his professional competence for anything except a disinterested search for truth is guilty of a kind of treachery.

Russel was guilty of stupidity though no doubt he was also a seditious cunt who was quite rightly jailed during the Great War.  

And when he assumes, in advance of inquiry, that certain beliefs, whether true or false, are such as to promote good behaviour, he is so limiting the scope of philosophical speculation as to make philosophy trivial;

it is trivial. Norbert Weiner saw through it at the age of 10. 

the true philosopher is prepared to examine all preconceptions. When any limits are placed, consciously or unconsciously, upon the pursuit of truth, philosophy becomes paralysed by fear, and the ground is prepared for a government censorship punishing those who utter "dangerous thoughts"--in fact, the philosopher has already placed such a censorship over his own investigations.

Russel was paranoid. Come to think of it Godel became so paranoid, he thought his food was being poisoned and that portions of Liebniz's Nachlass had been suppressed. 

Intellectually, the effect of mistaken moral considerations upon philosophy has been to impede progress to an extraordinary extent.

Nope. It has made no difference whatsoever. Moral considerations can't stop our anuses from producing turds. 

I do not myself believe that philosophy can either prove or disprove the truth of religious dogmas, but ever since Plato most philosophers have considered it part of their business to produce "proofs" of immortality and the existence of God.

Godel's proof of God is interesting for purely mathematical reasons.  

They have found fault with the proofs of their predecessors--SaintThomas rejected Saint Anselm's proofs, and Kant rejected Descartes'--but they have supplied new ones of their own.

Godel revived this ontological proof.  

In order to make their proofs seem valid, they have had to falsify logic,

No. They made a logical error. 

to make mathematics mystical, and to pretend that deep-seated prejudices were heaven-sent intuitions. All this is rejected by the philosophers who make logical analysis the main business of philosophy. They confess frankly that the human intellect is unable to find conclusive answers to many questions of profound importance to mankind,

and yet humans have indeed found such conclusive answers- e.g don't eat your own shit,

but they refuse to believe that there is some "higher" way of knowing, by which we can discover truths hidden from science and the intellect.

Yet, such must be the case. There are 'uncorrelated asymmetries' which dictate bourgeois strategies which are 'higher'- i.e. more eusocial- than the correlated equilibria available to a 'Science' or 'the Intellect' to which those uncorrelated asymmetries are as yet undetectable.  

For this renunciation they have been rewarded by the discovery that many questions, formerly obscured by the fog of metaphysics, can be answered with precision, and by objective methods which introduce nothing of the philosopher's temperament except the desire to understand. Take such questions as: What is number? What are space and time? What is mind, and what is matter?

They are subject to 'restricted comprehension' and arise only relative to a particular model or axiom system.  

I do not say that we can here and now give definitive answers to all these ancient questions, but I do say that a method has been discovered by which, as in science, we can make successive approximations to the truth, in which each new stage results from an improvement, not a rejection, of what has gone before.

No. Successive approximations may diverge rather than converge and involve wholesale rejection of what went before.  

In the welter of conflicting fanaticisms,

Russel was fanatically against the nuclear bombs which prevented his country from having to fight a third world war. 

one of the few unifying forces is scientific truthfulness, by which I mean the habit of basing our beliefs upon observations and inferences as impersonal, and as much divested of local and temperamental bias, as is possible for human beings.

Scientific truthfulness is as nothing compared to the whore who truthfully tells you she has never seen a todger as tiny as yours. No. This does not qualify you for a discount.  

To have insisted upon the introduction of this virtue into philosophy, and to have invented a powerful method by which it can be rendered fruitful, are the chief merits of the philosophical school of which I am a member.

But that merit was only such as we may ascribe to our own anal sphincter when it releases a turd.  We need to shit. We don't need others to shit for us. 

The habit of careful veracity acquired in the practice of this philosophical method

does not exist. Philosophers are stupid liars.  

can be extended to the whole sphere of human activity, producing, wherever it exists, a lessening of fanaticism

Russell was so fanatically opposed to his own country's national security interests that his people were obliged to send him to jail.  

with an increasing capacity of sympathy and mutual understanding.

Russell would often seek out Heidegger and try to kiss and cuddle with him.  

In abandoning a part of its dogmatic pretensions, philosophy does not cease to suggest and inspire a way of life

Which is stupid and useless.