I live in Britain. I'm reading "Moore: G.E. Moore and the cambridge Apostles" and "History of Western Philosophy"(by B. Russell). I'm studying "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism"(by B. Russell). I'm watching "The Hour" over and over again. Much to my disappointment my English won't be improved at all.
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<<The Philosophy of Logical Atomism>>, by B. Russell
1. Facts and Propositions
R's going to advocate the philosophy of logical atomism.
-atomic. "there are many separate things. The apparent multiplicity of the world isn't unreal divisions of a single indivisible reality"
-logical. "because atoms are the sort of last residue in logical analysis"
-atoms. "Some of them will be "particulars" - such things as little patches of colour or sounds, momentary things - and some of them will be predicates or relations and so on"
"The process of sound philosophizing, to my mind, consists mainly in passing from those obvious, vague, ambiguous things, that we feel quite sure of, to something precise, clear, definite, which by reflection and analysis we find is involved in the vague thing that we start from, and is, so to speak, the real truth of which that vague thing is a sort of shadow."
"Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise, and everything precise is so remote from everything that we normally think, that you cannot for a moment suppose that is what we really mean when we say what we think."
"The sort of premiss that a logician will take for a science will not be the sort of thing which is first known or easiest known: it will be a proposition having great deductive power, great cogency, and exactitude, quite a different thing from the actual premiss that your knowledge started from."
"Decartes is right: you should set to work to doubt things and retain only what you cannot doubt because of its clearness and distinctness, not because you are sure not to be induced into error."
"The world contains facts, which are what they are whatever we may choose to think about them, and that there are also beliefs, which have reference to facts, and by reference to facts are either true or false."
"When I speak of a facts I mean the kind of thing that makes a proposition true or false. If I say "It is raining", what I say is true in a certain condition of weather and is false in other conditions of weather. The condition of weather that makes my statement true(or false), is what I should call a "fact".
"The outer world is not completely described by a lot of particulars, but you must also take account of theses things that I call facts, which are the sort of things that you express by a sentence, and these, just as much as particular chairs and tables, are part of real world."
"You cannot describe the world completely without having general facts as well as particular facts."
"Every word is a symbol, every sentence, and so forth. When I speak of a symbol I simply mean something that means something else."
"Propositions are not names for facts. The relation of proposition to fact is a totally different one from the relation of name to the thing named. For each fact there are two propositions, one true and one false. In the case of a name, there is only one relation that it can have to what it names. A name can just name a particular, or, if it does not, it is not a name at all, it is a noise. Just as a word may be a name or be not a name but just a meaningless noise, so a phrase which is apparently a proposition may be either true or false, or may be meaningless."
"The thing you can do with facts is to assert it, or deny it, or desire it, or will it, or question it, but all those are things involving the whole proposition."
"Q: In making a start, whether you start with the empirical or the a priori philosophy, do you make your statement just at the beginning and come back to prove it, or do you never come back to the proof of it?
R: No, you never come back. I should like a statement which would be rough and vague and have that sort of obviousness that belongs to things of which you never know what they mean, but I should never get back to that statement. Here is a thing. We will look at it inside and out until we have extracted something and can say, now that is true. It will not really be the same as the thing we started from because it will be so much more analytic and precise."