Bertrand Russell Philosophy of Neutral Monism

INTRODUCTION Philosophy of mind is the branch of philosophy that studies nature of mind, mental functions, mental events, mental properties, consciousness and their relationship with the brain. The mind-body problem is sought to be resolved by two major schools of philosophy, viz., Dualism and Monism. The advocates of Dualism are many. For the sake of illustration, Plato of ancient Greek philosophy and Samkhya in Indian philosophy can be cited as two prominent sources of dualism. The Mind-Body problem is one of the foremost problems in modern philosophy. It starts with Descartes who advanced the doctrine of mind-body dualism according to which mind was pure consciousness and body pure extension. In order to work out the relationship between radically different mind and body, he proposed the theory of interactionism, which was later replaced by psychophysical parallelism of Spinoza. Leibnitz also critiqued mind-body dualism of Descartes through his theory of pre-established harmony. In mid 20th century, Gilbert Ryle, in his book The Concept of Mind, declared all doctrines pertaining to mind-body relationship to have emanated from a fallacy that he termed as Category Mistake or a fundamental confusion with regard to mind and body as logically same or similar entities. Long before Ryle's book, Bertrand Russell worked out his analysis of Mind-Body problem in such books as The Problems of Philosophy (1912), Our Knowledge of the External World (1914), The Analysis of Mind (1921), The Analysis of Matter (1927), and An Outline of Philosophy (1929) etc. Bertrand Russell is one of the most important and influential philosophers of the twentieth century. He is credited to have revived the British empirical tradition of Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Mill in opposition to the idealistic philosophy of Neo- Hegelians of his time. He wrote on a wide variety of philosophical subjects including epistemology and metaphysics. Through a long period of more than fifty years he wrote books in which he kept changing his views resulting into providing a number of theories on the issue of nature of ultimate stuff of the world and the knowledge of it. Russell came to philosophy proper through mathematics and logic. His 'theory of Types' and 'theory of Description' led him to conceive the idea of 'logical atoms.