ABSTRACT
In the summer of 1995, shortly before starting at Oxford, I was told to read The Problems of Philosophy (1912), one of many books written by the great English philosopher Bertrand Russell. Its contents came as a shock to me as I was astonished to see that this great man appeared to reduce philosophy to a series of linguistic games and obscure discussions of seemingly pointless topics. One such topic, I clearly remember, was the problem that Russell felt was posed by proving the existence of a table: how, he asked, could we ever know for certain whether a table existed or not? With painstaking logic Russell laid out how difficult it was to prove with absolute certainty the existence of a table – and anything else for that matter. Accustomed as I was to a rather grander vision of philosophy, I was disturbed at the prospect that I would be spending the next three years of my life among people who thought that this sort of inconsequential nonsense was the subject’s major problem and one worthy of our close attention.
