Russell on the length of doing philosophy

That, of course, is especially likely in very abstract studies such as philosophical logic, because the subject-matter that you are supposed to be thinking of is so exceedingly difficult and elusive that any person who has ever tried to think about it knows you do not think about it except perhaps once in six months for half a minute. The rest of the time you think about the symbols, because they are tangible, but the thing you are supposed to be thinking about is fearfully difficult and one does not often manage to think about it. The really good philosopher is the one who does once in six months think about it for a minute. Bad philosophers never do. 

Russell, 2010, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism, pp. 10-11

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Russell on philosophical method

There is not any superfine brand of knowledge, obtainable by the philosopher, which can give us a standpoint from which to criticize the whole of the knowledge of daily life. The most that can be done is to examine and purify our common knowledge by an internal scrutiny, assuming the canons by which it has been obtained, and applying them with more care and with more precision. Philosophy cannot boast of having achieved such a degree of certainty that it can have authority to condemn the facts of experience and the laws of science. The philosophic scrutiny, therefore, though sceptic  in regard to every detail, is not sceptical as regards the whole. That is to say, its criticism of details w  only be based upon their relation to other details, not upon some external criterion which can be applied to all the details equally. 

Russell, 1914, Our Knowledge of the External World as a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy, pp. 73-74

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Russell on philosophy

Considered in that way you may say that the whole of our problem belongs rather to science than to philosophy. I think perhaps that is true, but I believe the only difference between science and philosophy is, that science is what you more or less know and philosophy is what you do not know. Philosophy is that part of science which at present people choose to have opinions about, but which they have no knowledge about. Therefore every advance in knowledge robs philosophy of some problems which formerly it had, and if there is any truth, if there is any value in the kind of procedure of mathematical logic, it will follow that a number of problems which had belonged to philosophy will have ceased to belong to philosophy and will belong to science. And of course the moment they become soluble, they become to a large class of philosophical minds uninteresting, because to many of the people who like philosophy, the charm of it consists in the speculative freedom, in the fact that you can play with hypotheses. 

Russell, 2010, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism, p. 124

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Russell on ordinary language

It is exceedingly difficult to make this point clear as long as one adheres to ordinary language, because ordinary language is rooted in a certain feeling about logic, a certain feeling that our primeval ancestors had, and as long as you keep to ordinary language you find it very difficult to get away from the bias which is imposed upon you by language.

Russell, 2010, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism, p. 68.

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Quessertion

My some­ times mischievous friend Richard Grandy once said, in connection with some other occasion on which I was talking, that to represent my remarks, it would be necessary to introduce a new form of speech act, or a new operator, which was to be called the operator of ques­sertion. It is to be read as “It is perhaps possible that someone might assert that ...”, and is to be symbolized “?⊢”; possibly it might even be iterable.

Grice, “Meaning Revisited”

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Grice on Practical Use of Philosophy

But I doubt if any of the other tasks which I would like to see the philosophers fulfill will be enough to satisfy some people who raise this objection. They want philosophy to be grand, to yield one important, nonempirical information which will help one to solve either the world's problems or one's personal problems, or both. To them I feel inclined to reply in the end: “You are crying for the moon; philosophy has never really fulfilled this task, though it may sometimes have appeared to do so (and the practical consequences of its appearing to do so have not always been very agreeable). It is no more sensible to complain that philosophy is no longer capable of solving practical problems than it is to complain that the study of the stars no longer enables one to predict the course of world events.”

Paul Grice (1958) Postwar Oxford Philosophy

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Grice on Conceptual Analysis and Mystification

Many of the great philos­ophers’ questions can be interpreted as requests for a conceptual anal­ysis (not necessarily in full with the greatest precision). No doubt the great philosophers themselves did not recognize the possibility of this kind of interpretation (how could they have?), but the link between contemporary discussion and their work is sufficiently close to pro­ vide some justification for the continued use of the term “philoso­phy.” Moreover, it seems to me that many of the questions and puz­zles raised by the great philosophers are capable of really clear and detailed and rigorous treatment after reinterpretation of this kind. If I have to choose between reinterpretation and continued mystification, I choose reinterpretation.

Paul Grice (1958) Postwar Oxford Philosophy 

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