Vuillemin Reads Russell
The Age of Principles
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15173/jhap.v16i4.5865Abstract
In 1968, the French philosopher Jules Vuillemin published his Leçons sur la première philosophie de Russell. Based on his classes at Collège de France, the book features an in-depth study of Russell’s Principles of Mathematics. Vuillemin champions Russell’s philosophy as an alternative to the absolutist philosophies of his French colleagues. In this paper, I develop an account of the model of philosophy that Vuillemin extracts from Russell. I do this through a dual study of Vuillemin’s book on Russell, and his later book What Are Philosophical Systems? (1986). The latter book, I argue, can be read as further developing and making explicit the conception of a philosophical system that was already implicitly at work in his interpretation of Russell. That conception revolves around two main pillars. The first is that the structure of philosophical systems is modelled on the axiomatic method from science. The second is that the basic principles (axioms) of such a system are ontological posits about the fundamental constituents of reality. In this way, Vuillemin imbues his conception of a philosophical system with the pluralist, unapologetically realist, ontology that he found so appealing in Russell. In a Carnapian vein, moreover, Vuillemin combines forms of pluralism and voluntarism with a rejection of the absolutist approaches that he finds objectionable, by developing his conception of a philosophical system in such a way that the latter are excluded by fiat.
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