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Both Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell greatly respected each other's thoughts and were also good personal friends. Below are Einstein's philosophical remarks concerning Russell's Theory of Knowledge: "Apart from their masterful formulation these lines say something which had never previously occurred to me ... I owe innumerable happy hours to the reading of Russell's works, something which I cannot say of any other contemporary scientific writer ..."
"The overcoming of naïve realism has been relatively simple. In his introduction to his volume, An Inquiry Into Meaning and Truth, Russell has characterized this process in a marvellously pregnant fashion:
We all start from "naïve realism," i.e., the doctrine that things are what what they seem. We think that grass is green, that stones are hard, and that snow is cold. But physics assures us that the greenness of grass, the hardness of stones, and the coldness of snow, are not the greenness, hardness, and coldness that we know in our own experience, but something very different. The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself. Thus science seems to be at war with itself: when it most means to be objective, it finds itself plunged into subjectivity against its will. Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows that naive realism is false. Therefore naïve realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false. (pp. 14-15)
Apart from their masterful formulation these lines say something which had never previously occurred to me. For, superficially considered, the mode of thought in Berkeley and Hume seems to stand in contrast to the mode of thought in the natural sciences. However, Russell's just cited remark uncovers a connection: If Berkeley relies upon the fact that we do not directly grasp the "things" of the external world through our senses, but that only events causally connected with the presence of "things" reach our sense-organs, then this is a consideration which gets its persuasive character from our confidence in the physical mode of thought. For, if one doubts the physical mode of thought in even its most general features, there is no necessity to interpolate between the object and the act of vision anything which separates the object from the subject and makes the "existence of the object" problematical ...
It will now be clear what is meant if I make the following statement: By his clear critique Hume did not only advance philosophy in a decisive way but also-though through no fault of his-created a danger for philosophy in that, following his critique, a fateful "fear of metaphysics" arose which has come to be a malady of contemporary empiricistic philosophizing; this malady is the counterpart to that earlier philosophizing in the clouds, which thought it could neglect and dispense with what was given by the senses.
No matter how much one may admire the acute analysis which Russell has given us in his latest book on Meaning ond Truth, it still seems to me that even there the spectre of the metaphysical fear has caused some damage. For this fear seems to me, for example, to be the cause for conceiving of the "thing" as a "bundle of qualities," such that the "qualities" are to be taken from the sensory raw-material. Now the fact that two things are said to be one and the same thing, if they coincide in all qualities, forces one to consider the geometrical relations between things as belonging to their qualities."
— Albert Einstein, The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell (The Library of Living Philosophers. Vol. V). 1946, Part. II, Descriptive and Critical Essays on the Philosophy of Bertrand Russell, Ch. VIII: Russell's Theory of Knowledge, pp. 281-90
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Background: Naïve realism
In philosophy of perception and philosophy of mind, naïve realism (also known as direct realism, perceptual realism, or common sense realism) is the position that the human senses provide us with direct awareness of objects as they are. According to the naïve realist, the objects of perception are not representations of external objects, but are in fact those external objects themselves. The naïve realist is typically also a metaphysical realist, holding that these objects continue to obey the laws of physics and retain all of their properties regardless of whether or not there is anyone to observe them.
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Background: The Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein friendship
Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein had met from time to time, but they did not see much of each other except in the Autumn 1943, when they were both at Princeton University. Quickly becoming good friends, they would meet for weekend evenings (some of which would last until the early morning hours) for tea and pipe tobacco at Einstein’s home to discuss “various matters in the philosophy of science.”
Contrary to popular belief, Albert Einstein was never on the faculty at Princeton University, he occupied an office in the University’s mathematics building in the early 1940s while waiting for construction of the Institute for Advanced Study. By the early 1940s Bertrand Russell was nearly financially destitute form a combination giving away much of his inherited wealth to friends, families and charities, but more importantly, being dismissed by numerous universities for being "morally unfit". However, in 1931 he inherited and kept his families earldom (Russell once joked that his title was primarily used for the purpose of securing New York City hotel rooms). In late 1943 Russell was invited to lecture on “Postulates of Scientific Inference” at Bryn Mawr College, and Princeton University. At Bryn Mawr College’s library Russell did much of the writing for A History of Western Philosophy (1945) which provided him with the needed financial security for the latter part of his life finally settling in Penrhyndeudreath, Gwynedd, United Kingdom.
Russell wrote in is his Autobiography:
“On one occasion I was so poor that I had to take a single ticket to New York and pay the return fare out of my lecture fee. My A History of Western Philosophy was nearly complete, and I wrote to W. W. Norton, who had been my American publisher, to ask if, in view of my difficult financial position, he would make an advance on it.”
In 1943 Russell received an advance of $3000 from the publishers which greatly helped Russell and his family making ends meet. The Russell family finally returned to the UK (stressfully yet safely statistically voyaging across the Atlantic in German U-boat infested waters during the height of the Second World War) after years of financial and academic struggle during which Russell attempted to teach and find a home for his family in the US.
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hello. One of the BR. admin here. The quote you are thinking of could be this (have a good day): "The important thing is not what you believe, but how you believe it. If you think that your belief is based upon reason, you will support it by argument, rather than by persecution, and will abandon it if the argument goes against you. But if your belief is based on faith, you will realize that argument is useless, and will therefore resort to force either in the form of persecution or by stunting and distorting the minds of the young in what is called “education". This last is peculiarly dastardly, since it takes advantage of the defenselessness of immature minds. Unfortunately it is practised in a greater or less degree in the schools of every civilized country."
— Bertrand Russell, Human Society In Ethics And Politics (1954), Part. II: The Conflict of Passions, Ch. VII, Will Religious Faith Cure Our Troubles
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