Mach, Russell, and Scientific Philosophizing: Re-visiting the Realistic Empiricism of Evolutionary Culture

Abstract

Ernst Mach’s and Bertrand Russell’s philosophical outlooks contributed to shaping the philosophy of science of the 20th century. Mach is a philosophical interpreter of science, a positivist, and a historian, considering the general principles of science as condensed economic descriptions of observed facts. Russell held a view of the nature and relation of philosophy to science and to logic that can be described as essentially consistent. In this article, the aim is to explore how both Mach and Russell defended the classical version of “Neutral Monism”. Since it was developed as a reaction to the mechanical philosophy of nature, Neural Monism also emerged along with scientific psychology in the late 19th century. The attempt in this article is to examine their versions of neutral monism and emphasize their differences and convergences.