Bertrand Russell or Plato?

Question

Would you side more readily with Russell the skeptic or with Plato the idealist in the search for knowledge and truth, or with none of the two? Why?

Answer 1

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While Russell was instrumental in the formation of Analytic Philosophy,The Philosophy of Science, and Logical Positivism.His fundamental misunderstanding of God, and metaphysics led to failure of many of his projects and the sending of philosophy in the wrong direction. His first book An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry,Russell rejected when discovered that it methods would make the Einstein's

space-time model impossible.

Russell failed again when Godel's incompleteness theorem

made hash of his attempt to reduce philosophy to Logic in the Principia Mathematica.

Russell's philosophical children that house of clowns that called themselves the Logical Positivist faded away when they discovered that Logic and a priori asumptions could not be eliminated from scientific discourse.

Plato being a much wiser philosopher realized that technical most be balance by faith and poetry.That the Dream of Reason has tangible and intangible aspects and cannot be reduced to either extreme. However Russell was right in the area of Race Relations.

It is sometimes maintained that racial mixture is biologically undesirable. There is no evidence whatever for this view. Nor is there, apparently, any reason to think that Negroes are congenitally less intelligent than white people, but as to that it will be difficult to judge until they have equal scope and equally good social conditions.– Bertrand Russell, New Hopes for a Changing World (London: Allen & Unwin, 1951, p. 108)

Source(s): The Limits of Philosophy by Stanley Rosen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell

Answer 2

Russell, of course.

But if you think Russell wasn't an idealist or that Plato wasn't a skeptic, you are kidding yourself.

Anyone who searches for truth has to be both.