ABSTRACT
Bertrand Russell has for many years been the leading proponent of the importance of the analysis of language. More than a half-century ago, he wrote: "That all sound philosophy should begin with an analysis of propositions, is a truth too evident, perhaps to demand a proof." None the less, Russell sought to defend this "truth" with a sociological argument concerning the causes of philosophic beliefs. A large part of Western philosophy, Russell affirmed, was determined by the notion that every proposition must consist of a subject and a predicate. "Any philosophy," he said, "which uses either substance or the Absolute will be found, on inspection, to depend on this belief. Kant's belief in an unknowable thing-in-itself was largely due to the same theory." In his later writings, Russell often recurred to the sociological argument for the linguistic determination of philosophic ideas. "We have to guard," he wrote, "against assuming that grammar is the key to metaphysics," an assumption which he believed had been made by traditional philosophy. He re-
LEWIS S. FEUER
ferred with approval to the views of the philologist Sayee. "Sayee maintained that all European philosophy since Aristotle has been dominated by the fact that philosophers spoke Indo-European languages, and therefore supposed the world, like the sentences they were used to, necessarily divisible into subjects and predicates." The linguistic interpretation of philosophic history was central in Russell's thinking, but it was never supported with the requisite historical data. I t took on the character of a postulate whose proof was commended to others. He thus declared that "a great book might be written showing the influence of syntax on philosophy; in such a work, the author could trace in detail the influence of the subjectpredicate structure of sentences upon European thought, more particularly in the matter of 'substance.' "
In this essay, I shall try to show why this great book could not be written.
