1905: The Philosophical Landscape (Ray Monk)

What was happening in philosophy in 1905? In this talk, Ray Monk seeks to answer that question by picking out some of the most influential works of philosophy that were published in or shortly before that year, describing both those works themselves and their intellectual context. The works discussed include Bertrand Russell’s On Denoting, Gottlob Frege’s Fundamental Laws of Arithmetic, Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations, and Henri Poincaré’s Science and Hypothesis. The hope is to bring out how the seminal works of that period established the tone and content of twentieth century philosophy and drew the battlelines of the great philosophical disputes of the last hundred years: Intuitionism versus Logicism, Phenomenology versus Analytic Philosophy, etc.

This talk is from the 2005 EinsteinFest at the Perimeter Institute (which is perhaps why the talk begins with Einstein).