CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY

             The person who set the course contemporary philosophy in the English-speaking world was to follow was Bertrand Russell. Through his contributions to mathematical logic and his social and political activism, Russell was not only one of the major forces responsible for the revolution that has taken place in modem philosophy but was also one of the major figures responsible for the social and technological revolutions that have taken place in this century.

             Although Russell was the catalyst of the revolution in contemporary philosophy, it was his pupil, Ludwig Wittgenstein, who charted its course and gave it the tone and character that still marks it.

             Taking his cue from Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica (1910-1913), Wittgenstein went on to show in his first work, the Tractatus, that language, far from being a jungle as might at first be thought, has a definite structure and order to it, one that mirrors or pictures the structure of reality, and that the job of philosophy is to describe as accurately as possible what this structure is. In this way, philosophy may solve or dissolve, as the case may be, whatever philosophical problems might still remain.

             Believing that he had solved all the problems of philosophy, Wittgenstein gave up its study for other occupations. By 1929, however, he returned to philosophy. Although he did not this time seek to publish the results of his new investigations, he did, around 1933, begin to circulate his new ideas in the form of two sets of lecture notes, one in a blue folder (the Blue Book) , the other in brown (the Brown Book). The ideas presented there were at first regarded as representing a complete break with those contained in the Tractatus, as well as being wholly unprecedented in the history of philosophy; however, neither of these views is now considered entirely accurate.

             In retrospect, we can now see that Wittgenstein, like his predecessors in philosophy, was concerned in these later works with describing the conceptual systems we use, or are compelled to use, in our effort to arrive at a knowledge of reality-conceptual systems (language in his case) that, because of their very nature, must represent a veil between us and the reality they seek to glimpse. Philosophical theories, Wittgenstein therefore concluded, as he had in the Tractatus, being products of the distorting mirror of language, are necessarily confusions.

             The philosophy inspired and set in motion by Russell and Wittgenstein, called linguistic analysis or analytic philosophy, has had its greatest vogue in Englishspeaking countries. On the European continent the philosophy that has been most dominant in the contemporary world has been existentialism, a school of thought that came into prominence following World War 11.

             Two of existentialism's main founders or predecessors-Sören Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche-were thinkers who lived in the nineteenth century, They were most concerned with the question of what people should do and what they should believe, seeing that the world is irrational and meaningless. Kierkegaard advocated that the solution to our problems lay in blind faith and trust in God; Nietzsche, believing that"God is dead"argued that the solution to our predicament must come from ourselves, in living life as fully and passionately as possible.

             The twentieth-century philosopher whose name has become synonymous with existentialism is Jean-Paul Sartre. At the foundation of his thinking lies the belief that there is no grand design to the world and no meaning to it. It has no special plan or destiny, and the same is true of humanity. Prior philosophers were mistaken in thinking that essence precedes existence; the truth is that existence precedes essence. But rather than allowing this fact to defeat us, we should make the most of what there is, trusting only in ourselves.

             Although these two twentieth-century philosophical movements may seem worlds apart, on closer examination they are seen to have much in common: both share the belief in the arbitrariness of what exists-things simply are the way they are; they could easily have been otherwise-and both conclude that the world is devoid of value. In short, both believe the world is absurd and that life is meaningless (that is, there is nothing necessary about what exists, nor does it have any value in itself). They differ, however, in what they conceive their primary jobs as philosophers to be: analytical philosophers believe it is to describe, as far as it is possible to do so, the world's logical structure and properties; existentialists believe that the philosopher's task is to explore our resultant modem plight.