The Problems of Philosophy
Bertrand RussellSözler ve Alıntılar
IS there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?
Sayfa 5 - müthiş bir başlangıçKitabı okudu
Let us give the name of 'sense-data' to the things that are immediately known in sensation: such things as colours, sounds, smells, hardnesses, roughnesses, and so on. We shall give the name 'sensation' to the experience of being immediately aware of these things.
Thus, whenever we see a colour, we have a sensation of the colour, but the colour itself is a sense-datum, not a sensation.
But if the reality is not what appears, have we any means of knowing whether there is any reality at all?
Sayfa 7
Similar difficulties arise when we consider the sense of touch. It is true that the table
always gives us a sensation of hardness, and we feel that it resists pressure. But the sensation we obtain depends upon how hard we press the table and also upon what part of the body we press with; thus the various sensations due to various pressures or various parts of the body cannot be supposed to reveal directly any definite property of the table, but at most to be signs of some property which perhaps causes all the sensations, but is not actually apparent in any of them. And the same applies still more obviously to the sounds which can be elicited by rapping the table.
He admits that there must be something which continues to exist when we go out of the room or shut our eyes, and that what we call seeing the table does really give us reason for believing in something which persists even when we are not seeing it.
Sayfa 6
Philosophy should show us the hierarchy of our instinctive beliefs, beginning with those we hold most strongly, and presenting each as much isolated and as free from irrelevant additions as possible.
Sayfa 12
Nature of matter
It is sometimes said that 'light is a form of wave-motion', but this is misleading, for the light which we immediately see, which we know directly by means of our senses, is not a form of wave-motion, but something quite different
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When it is said that light is waves, what is really meant is that waves are the physical cause of our sensations of light.
Sayfa 13