How is Russell's position on adultery related to his concept of time with respect to epistemology and metaphysics?

Answer 1

Metaphysics is not a school or tradition but rather a sub-discipline within philosophy, as are ethics, logic and epistemology. Like many philosophical terms, "metaphysics" can be understood in a variety of ways, so any discussion of Bertrand Russell's metaphysics must select from among the various possible ways of understanding the notion, for example, as the study of being qua being, the study of the first principles or grounds of being, the study of God, and so forth. The primary sense of "metaphysics" examined here in connection to Russell is the study of the ultimate nature and constituents of reality.

Since what we know, if anything, is assumed to be real, doctrines in metaphysics typically dovetail with doctrines in epistemology. But in this article, discussion of Russell's epistemology is kept to a minimum in order to better canvas his metaphysics, beginning with his earliest adult views in 1897 and ending shortly before his death in 1970. Russell revises his conception of the nature of reality in both large and small ways throughout his career. Still, there are positions that he never abandons; particularly, the belief that reality is knowable, that it is many, that there are entities - universals - that do not exist in space and time, and that there are truths that cannot be known by direct experience or inference but are known a priori.

The word "metaphysics" sometimes is used to describe questions or doctrines that are a priori, that is, that purport to concern what transcends experience, and particularly sense-experience. Thus, a system may be called metaphysical if it contains doctrines, such as claims about the nature of the good or the nature of human reason, whose truth is supposed to be known independently of (sense) experience. Such claims have characterized philosophy from its beginnings, as has the belief that they are meaningful and valuable. However, from the modern period on, and especially in Russell's own lifetime, various schools of philosophy began to deny the legitimacy and desirability of a priorimetaphysical theorizing. In fact, Russell's life begins in a period sympathetic to this traditional philosophical project, and ends in a period which is not. Concerning these "meta-metaphysical" issues (that is, doctrines not in metaphysics but aboutit and its feasibility), Russell remained emphatically a metaphysician throughout his life. In fact, in his later work, it is this strand more than doctrines about the nature of reality per se that justify his being considered as one of the last, great metaphysicians.