ЛОГИЧЕСКИЙ АТОМИЗМ

Logical Atomism

A conception formulated by Russell in Our Knowledge of the External World (1914), The Philosophy of Logical Atomism (1918), and other works, and by Wittgenstein in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. According to Logical Atomism, the whole world is a totality of atomic facts.

The philosophy of logical atomism, as Russell himself has admitted, is an extreme pluralism, because it asserts the existence of a multiplicity of individual things and denies them any unity or integrity. To some extent Logical Atomism was a reaction to the absolute idealism of F. Bradley, who held that only the absolute, the whole was real and that individual things were merely apparent.

In Wittgenstein's Tractatus, Logical Atomism forms a kind of ontological argument for a definite logico-epistemological conception which regards all knowledge as a totality of "atomic" propositions connected by logical operations and infers the structure of the world by analogy with the logical pattern of knowledge. Logical Atomism absolutizes the discrete and the individual. The unsoundness of the theory was ultimately acknowledged even by its advocates.