Logical atomism

Logical atomism is a philosophical view that originated in the early 20th century with the development of analytic philosophy.

It is also widely held that the early works[a] of his Austrian-born pupil and colleague, Ludwig Wittgenstein, defend a version of logical atomism, though he went on to reject it in his later Philosophical Investigations.

[2] Gustav Bergmann also developed a form of logical atomism that focused on an ideal phenomenalistic language, particularly in his discussions of J.O.

[4] Russell was developing and responding to what he called "logical holism"—i.e., the belief that the world operates in such a way that no part can be known without the whole being known first.

His views on philosophy and its methods were heavily influenced by revolutionary nineteenth-century mathematics by figures like Cantor, Dedekind, Peano, and Weierstrass.

If this can be successfully accomplished, there is every reason to hope that the near future will be as great an epoch in pure philosophy as the immediate past has been in the principles of mathematics.

Russell thought the revolutionary mathematical work could, through the development of relations, produce a similar revolution in philosophy.

Russell believes in fact that logical atomism, fully carried out and implemented throughout philosophy, is the realization of his 1901 ambition.

Russell referred to his atomistic doctrine as contrary to the tier "of the people who more or less follow Hegel" (PLA 178).

In 1905, Russell had already criticized Alexius Meinong, whose theories led to the paradox of the simultaneous existence and non-existence of fictional objects.

This theory of descriptions was crucial to logical atomism, as Russell believed that language mirrored reality.

Rather than decoding the complex in a top-down manner, logical atomism analyzes its propositions individually before considering their collective effect.

Russell's perspective on belief proved a point of contention between him and Wittgenstein, causing it to shift throughout his career.

In Russell's viewpoint, this necessitates the negative fact, whereas Wittgenstein maintained the more conventional Principle of Bivalence, in which the states "P" and "Not (P)" cannot coexist.

In his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein explains his version of logical atomism as the relationship between proposition, state of affairs, object, and complex, often referred to as "Picture theory".

Wittgenstein was decidedly skeptical of epistemology, which tends to value unifying metaphysical ideas while depreciating the casewise and methodological inspection of philosophy that dominates his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

Wittgenstein's work bears the exact philosophical determinants that he openly dismissed, hence his later abandonment of this theory altogether.

For Wittgenstein, metaphysics and ethics were nonsensical - as they did not "speak of facts" - though he did not mean to devalue their importance in life by describing them in this way.

[13] Russell, on the other hand, believed that these subjects, particularly ethics, though belonging not to philosophy nor science and possessing an inferior epistemological foundation, were not only of certain interest, but also meaningful.

(Chapter 1: "Introductory Outline")Even into the 1960s, Russell claimed that he "rather avoided labels" in describing his views—with the exception of "logical atomism.

"[15] Philosophers such as Willard Van Orman Quine, Hubert Dreyfus and Richard Rorty went on to adopt logical holism.