ABSTRACT
(1) The fact that Russell wrote so many philosophical books and papers over so many years makes it very difficult to give an accurate and sequential account either of his philosophy as a whole or of any important part of it. ‘As we all know,’ wrote Professor Broad, ‘Mr Russell produces a different system of philosophy every few years.’ 1 Although this was a rhetorical exaggeration, Broad’s suggestion was not entirely ungrounded. The variety of opinions and approaches that strike the reader who tries to follow Russell’s views in chronological order is at first sight bewildering. In this chapter, I shall try to follow only one group of theories – those about sense perception. But even here, the material is not easy to sort and order so that we can be reasonably confident that we have done Russell justice both in exposition and in criticism. In the years 1912–27 he published five books and a number of papers in which he dealt among other matters with questions of sense perception. And though he returned briefly to the topic in An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (1940) and Human Knowledge (1948) he made no substantial changes in his views. He makes this clear in his last writings on philosophy published in 1959. 2
