The guitar has always played a primary role in the composition, performance, and image of country music. The steel-string acoustic guitar, or “flat-top,” provided the rhythmic and harmonic foundation in the original string bands and has since been included in all country music recordings and performances without exception. In North America, the acoustic guitar has become a symbol not only of country music, but of traditionalism, rural values, “down-homeness,” and a folk-based ideology.

The authenticity of a country music performance depends upon stylistic variables that combine to create a personal musical experience both for the audience and for the performer. Musical elements such as vocal sound, subject, performance practice, and instrumentation merge with iconographic ones such as boots, cowboy hats, pedal steel guitar, and acoustic guitar in order to maintain this authenticity and produce the genre recognized by audiences as country music.

The traditionalism associated with the acoustic guitar lives on in the repertory of folk songs, ballads, dances, and instrumental pieces brought to North America by Anglo-Celtic immigrants during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. British folk culture came to all regions of English-speaking North America, and pockets of tradition still exist in such places as rural New England, Appalachia, and the Maritime provinces of Canada. By the same token, country music is deeply rooted in the folklore of British broadside ballads, which were transported to the New World and gained life as “Americana.” It speaks to its audience from a rural perspective and serves as a vehicle for tapping into and assessing public opinion, relating personal experience, and commenting on situations or events.

THE PERSON AND THE SYMBOL

Martin Luther the historical figure assigned to teach biblical studies at an obscure university in the eastern part of what is now Germany and Martin Luther, cultural symbol, parted company on or about October 31, 1517, and have had an unpredictable relationship ever since. Assessing the differences is the critical task in approaching this compellingly attractive and equally repugnant man.

The historical dimensions of Luther's life follow a familiar pattern. The son of an upwardly mobile miner, Hans Luder or Ludder, and of the daughter of a fairly prominent family, Margarethe Lindemann, he was set aside for a career in law. In the course of his studies, Luther believed himself to have been redirected toward a religious vocation – a crossover well known to law and theological faculties. When he took orders as an Augustinian monk, Luther attracted a mentor, Johan von Staupitz, who promoted his career, moving him forward in the order.

Luther’s academic career was also fairly routine, at least in its outline.Upon completion of the doctorate, while taking his share of pastoral duties,the young monk was assigned to teach courses in Old and New Testamentat the University of Wittenberg, a town of 2,000 that was the capital ofElectoral Saxony. As a teacher, he was caught up in an occupational hazardof academic life: academic, churchly, and political polemics. Thoughhis personal circumstances changed – most dramatically in being excommunicated,outlawed, and for all of this, marrying – Luther continued hisvocation until his death, in February of 1546. If events had not combinedto put him in a symbolic spotlight, the story would have ended right there.

Jazz is distinct from certain other art forms – notably Western art music – in its emphasis on performance as the primary medium of creative achievement, and many of the greatest jazz composers, such as Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk, are also among its greatest players. For this reason, the following discussion of jazz guitar styles appropriately centers on the individual musicians who have pioneered those styles, and, from time to time, on individual recordings that epitomize them.

The history of jazz begins in obscurity around the beginning of the twentieth century at a time when much popular and folk music of oral tradition was not yet widely written about or captured on recordings. The guitar was already well entrenched as a versatile instrument for popular music: a “poor man's piano,” maybe, but also a rich resource in its own right. It was one of many stringed instruments, and combinations of one kind or another – including banjo orchestras, mandolin orchestras, Hawaiian groups, Mexican mariachi groups, minstrel groups, and “Gypsy” bands, to name a few – were ubiquitous. Their sound is echoed today in the legacy of folk, bluegrass, and other string-band music, but the range and stand-alone capability of the guitar made it particularly useful for ragtime and blues, the two greatest influences in the formation of jazz.

Like many important philosophers around the turn of the last century, Russell came to philosophy from mathematics. From 1890 to 1893 he studied for Part I of the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos, as the Cambridge examination was called. That he started with mathematics was inevitable: all Cambridge students had to take either classics or mathematics for Part I of their degree, and Russell was neither good at, nor interested in, classics. Nonetheless, mathematics recommended itself to Russell for other reasons than necessity.

He went up to Cambridge with the hope of discovering what, if anything, could be known with certainty and with the conviction that, if anything could, it would be found in mathematics. These high hopes were rapidly dashed by the realities of the Tripos. The fact that so many students with differing interests had to take mathematics at Cambridge meant that the mathematics taught was relatively elementary and strongly oriented to physical application and geometrical intuition. Not that the Mathematical Tripos was easy; study for it was a relentless grind of practice in the solution of mathematically trivial, but fiendishly complicated, applications problems. The great developments of nineteenth-century mathematics, for example, in analysis and non-Euclidean geometry, and all the developments mentioned by Grattan-Guinness in his paper in this volume, were entirely ignored as unsuitable to the needs of most students. In particular, the nineteenth-century drive towards rigour and unification in mathematics was absent from Cambridge, which, despite its continuing high reputation in the subject, had become a mathematical backwater by the end of the century.

There are many familiar themes in Russell's repertoire, but his later discussions of knowledge include many insights which have received little notice. Indeed, it is often supposed that in the years after 1914, after the heroic foundational phase of analytical philosophy celebrated in countless anthologies, Russell ceased to engage in creative philosophy and turned instead to popular tracts on marriage and morals, idleness and happiness. One thing I want to show here is that during these years Russell was in fact developing a new conception of epistemology, linked to a new philosophy of mind, which was so far ahead of his time that it passed by largely unappreciated. It is only now that our own philosophy of mind has caught up with the 'naturalisation' of the mind that Russell was teaching from 1921 onwards that we can recognise in his later writings the central themes of our current debates - concerning the significance of the causation of belief, the tension between 'externalist' and 'internalist' perspectives concerning knowledge, and the limits of empiricism.

To discuss these later themes properly, however, we have to start from a discussion of the tensions inherent in his earlier epistemology, and the text from which to start is his famous ‘shilling-shocker’ The Problems of Philosophy (1912), in which Russell presents a general survey of the subject grounded in a theory of knowledge.

Empiricism is the family of theories which in one or another may locate the source or, at very least, the test of contingent knowledge in experience - specifically, in sensory experience. More circumstantially, it is the family of theories which variously require experiential grounds for concepts to have content or applicability, or for expressions in a given language to have sense. In these versions of a formulation, due allowance is made for the thought that the content of perceptual states, suitably construed, are to be considered the occasion or basis for certain kinds of fundamental judgments from which, together with other premises, our less fundamental judgments about the world (or things other than the content of those states of sensitivity themselves) can be inferred.

In a qualified sense of this broadly characterised position, Russell was an empiricist, and his epistemology remained, in that qualified sense, empiricist throughout its development. But he was also critical of certain forms of empiricism, and the focus of his own concerns were such that his aims in formulating epistemological views, and his evolving attempts to realise these aims in detail, are not straightforwardly traditional. The chief reason for this is that his overarching concern was the question of how science is related to subjective experience, beginning (in the work done in 1911–14) with attempts to show how the fundamental concepts of physics can be derived from experience, and ending (in 1948) by shifting attention to the question of the non-empirical features of knowledge-acquisition required for bridging the gap between experience and science.

Russell's theory of descriptions was first published in his 1905 essay, “On Denoting”,which is surely one of the two or three most famous articles in twentieth-century analytic philosophy. It has been described as “a paradigm of philosophy”, and has been employed by many later analytic philosophers, such as Quine, although disputed by others, perhaps most notably Strawson. Writing in 1967, an astute commentator said: “In the forty-five years preceding the publication of Strawson's 'On Referring', Russell's theory was practically immune from criticism. There is not a similar phenomenon in contemporary analytic philosophy”.

What is the theory which has excited such interest and acclaim? To put it briefly and more or less neutrally, it is a method of analyzing definite descriptions, also called singular descriptions, i.e., phrases, in English typically beginning with the word “the”, which pick out or purport to pick out a single (“definite”) object – e.g., “the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo”, or “the first President of the USA”. Many philosophers who have accepted the theory of definite descriptions, including Russell himself, have also treated some or all proper names in similar fashion. They are taken to be disguised definite descriptions, and then subjected to the same analysis as overt definite descriptions. Definite descriptions may be contrasted with indefinite descriptions, which do not purport to pick out any particular number of objects – e.g., “any President of the USA”. Note that while the two phrases “the even prime number” and “any even prime number” in fact direct our attention to the same object – the number two – the first is a definite description, while the second is an indefinite description.

Bertrand Russell made use of logic as an analytical tool from the start of his philosophical career and early on adopted a metaphysics that can be called “atomism ” in opposition to “monism”. The name “logical atomism” is nevertheless useful for identifying a distinctive combination of metaphysical and logical doctrines characteristic of Russell's work from around 1910 to at least 1925. Russell introduced the name in his series of lectures in 1918 (PLA), so characterising his “philosophical position”and used it again later for the title of a 1924 essay (LA). He describes this philosophy as the combination of a “. . . logical doctrine which seems to me to result from the philosophy of mathematics . . .” and “. . . on the basis of this a certain kind of metaphysic” (PLA, 160). The metaphysics is not simply derivative from his logical theory resulting merely from reading a metaphysical theory off the expressions of a logically perspicuous language. In a passage of the lectures on the notion of complexity Russell describes certain definitions as “. . . preliminary because they start from the complexity of the proposition, which we define psychologically, and proceed to the complexity of the fact, whereas it is quite clear that in an orderly, proper procedure it is the complexity of the fact that you would start from” (PLA, 175). The right way to analyze certain expressions into a logical language would seem to follow from a correct metaphysical analysis of facts rather than leading it.

introduction

The doctrine of Neutral Monism was an avowed part of Russell's metaphysics for only a relatively short period in his amazingly long philosophical career, although it remained an active ingredient for considerably longer. His acceptance of this doctrine was gradual. To a lecture audience in early 1918, when he was in his mid-forties, he declared: “I feel more and more inclined to think that [Neutral Monism] may be true. I feel more and more that the difficulties that occur in regard to it are all of the sort that may be solved by ingenuity” [PLA Papers 8, p. 242]. Shortly afterwards, Russell gave a partial endorsement of the doctrine and then, during the next decade, in major works like The Analysis of Mind, An Outline of Philosophy and The Analysis of Matter, he set about to deepen and refine that endorsement. For more than two decades thereafter, the metaphysical imprint of Neutral Monism remained evident in Russell's major philosophical writings (An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, Human Knowledge), though he no longer marshalled his views explicitly under its banner. Neutral Monism constitutes, therefore, a major part of Russell's philosophy outside the area of formal logic. Indeed, the doctrine plays a kind of antipodal role in the whole development of his thought, for prior to taking the first steps towards accepting Neutral Monism, Russell had been its most severe critic.

formative themes

To see why Russell regarded Neutral Monism as an important doctrine even when he was its staunch opponent, it is necessary to recall some of the ideals and values which shaped his philosophical outlook from nearly the start of his career and which continued to be active, though in different proportions and with changing interpretations, to the end.

There are three major ideas arising from Russell's work in logic and philosophy of mathematics which he believed to be of philosophical importance for the theory of our knowledge of the physical world. The first was his theory of descriptions; the second, the concept of structure; and the third, the notion of a logical construction. The use of logical constructions in theory of knowledge was most prominent during Russell's phenomenalist period, the period which culminated with Knowledge of the External World. This phase of Russell's thought falls outside the purview of the present work. Logical constructions play an important - but very different - role in his subsequent realism, where they occur mainly in connection with the “interpretation” of the theory of space-time, and where they subserve both metaphysical and epistemological goals. Although we will have occasion to refer to this application of logical constructions toward the very end of the essay, considerations of space prevent us from exploring their use in any detail. Our focus here will be on the second of these ideas - the concept of structure - and the development of Russell's “structuralism.” But before turning to this topic, it will be worthwhile to sketch Russell’s application of his theory of descriptions to theory of knowledge; this application and his structuralism are often discussed together with the result that they are not always as sharply distinguished from one another as they should be.

introduction

A surprising feature of Russell's work in logic is that he began and ended with a theory of types. This chapter begins with a summary of the 1903 theory of types and then proceeds to the much more complex ramified theory of types that emerged from Russell's intense work on the foundations of logic from 1903 to 1907. After discussing the problems connected with the Axiom of Reducibility, the chapter concludes with the simple theory of types, and the later history of type theory, after the demise of the logicist programme.

the 1903 theory of types

Russell’s early theory of types, presented in Appendix B to the Principles of Mathematics, already contains many of the basic features of the mature system given in his fundamental paper of 1908 and in Principia Mathematica. In 1901, Russell had begun writing out the derivation of mathematics from logic, employing the methods of Peano and his school. This led him to examine Cantor’s proof that there is no greatest cardinal number. This result conflicted with his assumption that there is a universal class, having all objects as members, which ought to have the greatest cardinal number. Close analysis of the diagonal argument used in Cantor’s proof led to the discovery of the paradox of the class of all classes that are not members of themselves, now called “Russell’s paradox,” but which Russell called “the Contradiction.”

The logical paradoxes emerged at an awkward moment, when Russell had already written most of the penultimate draft of the Principles. Rather than hold up its publication indefinitely, he took the manuscript of his book to the printer in May 1902 before finding a solution. His initial reaction was that the Contradiction was of a somewhat trivial character, and that it could be avoided by a simple modification of the primitive propositions of logic.

A major component of Russell's philosophical work was the development of a distinctive method of philosophising, which, though he consistently applied it throughout his career, has been largely ignored. This lack of understanding of Russell's method has been a main cause of the still widespread perception that the progress of his philosophy is fragmented and erratic. This chapter will, firstly, outline key characteristics of Russell's method of philosophical analysis and show how this method underpins a number of his best known contributions to philosophy. Secondly, because his philosophical writings from the 1920s onwards have been rather neglected, some of his work of the late 1940s and early 1950s will be discussed to show that it exemplifies the same basic philosophical method. This will have the effect of emphasising the unity and continuity of Russell's philosophy.Finally, defective accounts of Russell’s philosophy in some critical works are traced to misunderstanding of his method of analysis.

russell’s method of philosophical analysis

Throughout his career Russell adhered to a characteristic view of the nature of philosophical analysis according to which it has two parts. Firstly, philosophical analysis proceeds backwards from a body of knowledge to its premisses, and, secondly, it proceeds forwards from the premisses to a reconstruction of the original body of knowledge. Russell often called the first stage of philosophical analysis simply “analysis”, in contrast to the second stage which he called “synthesis” (or, sometimes, “construction”). While the first stage was seen as being the most philosophical, both stages were nonetheless essential to philosophical analysis. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to fully document the claim that Russell consistently adhered to this two-directional view of philosophical analysis throughout his career; however, a consideration of some representative writings of Russell will further clarify his view of philosophical analysis and its implications.