The Basics of Neo-Realist Cosmology: Bertrand Russell against Alfred North Whitehead

The article presents a comparative analysis of neo-realist views of Russell and Whitehead on cosmology in the first decades of the 20 th century. It is noted that despite the similarity of the basic theoretical and methodological principles of their philosophizing, these thinkers formulated philosophico-cosmological conceptions that differed significantly from each other. The reason for this was that Russell, at the epistemological level, used the theory of degrees of certainty, and on the logical one he developed the theory of descriptions, but Whitehead, in contrast, was a supporter of the theory of critical realism in epistemology and the method of extensive abstraction in logic. All this influenced the former to pay more attention to the questions of analysis and, accordingly, to use the basic concepts of facts, logical atoms, and propositions, and the latter to focus on the question of synthesis and to consider the structure of being through the prism of concepts of actual entities, eternal objects and prehension. Hence the world for Russell is a static formation (set of events), and we only need to define its laws, and for the Whitehead world is a dynamic formation (set of processes), the laws of which still need to be understood. It is emphasized that as a result, Russell’s cosmology rejected the previous metaphysics, but Whitehead’s cosmology aimed at finding the origins of modern cosmology in the writings of early thinkers. Nevertheless, it is argued that the cosmological teachings of both had a significant influence on the development of analytic philosophy.