Many thanks to esmemoria for setting the example of how to review a philosophy book in this review of Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus. It inspired me to review Russell.
Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy starts simply. As a thought experiment, Russell asks the reader to picture a table. What do you see? What can you really know about what you see? Do you know there is table, or do you know your sense-data, which makes you think “table”?
In this way, the book is an introduction to philosophy. However, Russell only covers a few branches (logic, epistemology, phenomenology), and only in the briefest of ways.
After thinking back on my experience of reading through the book, though, I think Russell is rather brief and mysterious on purpose. How much “philosophy” can a wisdom lover really take in at once? And that is kind of the point. Russell doesn’t want philosophy to be a tick box or, I don’t know, an idle salon conversation. An academic diversion.
To Russell, philosophy is supposed to be engagement with the world:
Philosophy, if it cannot answer so many questions as we could wish, has at least the power of asking questions which increase the interest of the world, and show the strangeness and wonder lying just below the surface in the commonest things of daily life.
Wait, what is this place, really? How do I know? What should the world be like? Philosophy is a wrestling, a process, an ongoing conversation. It’s the best we can do to rationally arrive at consensus or make any progress. That is why many areas which were previously “philosophy” are now fields of their own (e.g., natural philosophy to science).
Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certain what is the true answer to the doubts which it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom. Thus, while diminishing our feeling of certainty as to what things are, it greatly increases our knowledge as to what they may be…
By teasing out the table discussion, Russell makes the case that philosophy not only helps us understand the world in a more coherent way, but also makes us better, more fulfilled people:
Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination, and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closed the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes the highest good.
Coherence and sense-making sound good right about now. I’ll keep exploring!
P.S. Many moons ago, I read and reviewed Russell’s History of Western Philosophy.