Bertrand Russell - Our Knowledge of the External World

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Our Knowledge of the External World

It is in every sense an epoch-making book: one that has been needed and expected for years.

Cambridge Magazine

The author maintains a fresh and brilliant yet easy style which always makes his writings a pleasure to read.

Nature

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As a field for scientific method in philosophy

Bertrand Russell

London and New York

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This edition first published in 1914
by Open Court Publishing Company

First published in Routledge Classics 2009
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA
by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2009.

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2009 The Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation Ltd

Introduction 1993 John G. Slater

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Russell, Bertrand, 18721970.
Our knowledge of the external world : as a field for scientific
method in philosophy / Bertrand Russell.
p. cm.(Routledge classics)
Orignally published: Chicago : Open Court Pub. Co., 1914.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Knowledge, Theory of. 2. Logical atomism. I. Title.
B1649.R93O8 2009
121dc22

ISBN 0-203-87536-2 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0-415-47377-2 (pbk)

ISBN13: 978-0-415-47377-4 (pbk)

ISBN10: 0-203-87536-2 (ebk)

ISBN13: 978-0-203-87536-0 (ebk)

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This book is the printed version of the Lowell lectures which Russell delivered in Boston during the spring of 1914. The Lowell Institutes invitation had arrived and been accepted early in 1913, but the topic of his lectures was finally settled only late in June. This topic was his second choice. His first, the place of good and evil in the universe, was rejected by the Institute on the ground that the terms of the trust did not allow lecturers to question the authority of Scripture. He called his approved topic popular lectures on scientific method, which afterwards, for a reason to be mentioned later, supplied the subtitle of the delivered lectures and of the published book.

In at least two places Russell had recorded his memory of the writing of Our Knowledge of the External World. In his Autobiography, which was written in the early 1930s and revised in spurts, beginning shortly after the Second World War and ending only with its publication in 1967, he gave a dramatic account of its genesis. And in 1951 in a talk called How I Write, which he broadcast on the BBC and which is published in Portraits from

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Memory and Other Essays (1956), he told the same story again, and made it even more dramatic:

I had undertaken to give the Lowell Lectures at Boston, and had chosen as my subject Our Knowledge of the External World. Throughout 1913 I thought about this topic. In term time in my room at Cambridge, in vacations in a quiet inn on the upper reaches of the Thames, I concentrated with such intensity that I sometimes forgot to breathe and emerged panting as from a trance. But all to no avail. To every theory that I could think of I could perceive fatal objections. At last, in despair, I went off to Rome for Christmas, hoping that a holiday would revive my flagging energy. I got back to Cambridge on the last day of 1913, and although my difficulties were still completely unresolved I arranged, because the remaining time was short, to dictate as best as I could to a stenographer. Next morning, as she came in at the door, I suddenly saw exactly what I had to say, and proceeded to dictate the whole book without a moments hesitation.

He goes on to say: I do not want to convey an exaggerated impression. The book is very imperfect, and I now think that it contains serious errors. But it was the best that I could have done at that time, and a more leisurely method (within the time at my disposal) would almost certainly have produced something worse.