For this lecture, I’ll suggest an outline and give some background for a few references to material in the lectures you aren’t reading.

• Russell begins with an introduction (pp. 169-170) in which he makes three points, one about traditional metaphysics as a product of a misunderstanding of “philosophical grammar,” one that reviews the starting points of his logical analysis, and a third that cites Occam’s Razor (which is typically formulated as the injunction “Do not multiply entities beyond necessity”—i.e., don’t assume the existence of more than you need to). Russell associates his use of Occam’s Razor with something he says later: “I am not denying the existence of anything; I am only refusing to affirm it” (p. 172). This would be a good place ask yourself what philosophy is according to Russell and whether you are sympathetic to his views about it.

• Russell continues (pp. 171-175) with the application of his sort of analysis to questions of existence, questions of what there is. He does this in the case of (i) continuing physical objects (e.g., desks or atoms), (ii) phantoms and hallucinations, and (iii) people. In each of these cases, think again whether you agree with him.

• He ends the lecture with a discussion of “neutral monism.” In spite of the name, this is not an example of monism in the sense of the term used in the first lecture; it offers the answer “one” not to the question “How many things are there?” but instead to the question “How many kinds of things are there?” (and its one kind is “neutral” between mind and matter). When he gave these lectures, Russell wasn’t yet ready to commit himself to this view; but he did adopt it later.

Russell makes several specific references to topics in lectures III-VII. I can’t fill these out completely (indeed Russell’s own discussion of these topics in the earlier lectures is somewhat sketchy), but I’ll try to make his references a little less mysterious.

Logical fictions. Russell says of various things that he analyses using the ideas of classes (i.e., sets) that they are “logical fictions.” This is related to his views of the nature of classes (worked out in the work Principia Mathematica that he mentioned in lecture II). Classes are not particulars according to him—and they are thus not things and are “fictions” in that sense. Classes are instead closely related to predicates or “propositional functions” (which, roughly, are like predicates except that they might logically complex—i.e., “is red and flat” or “is admired by everyone”). Talk of classes is “fictional” in the sense that it is really talk of propositional functions masquerading as talk of things. (Russell applies this idea to numbers by way Frege’s account of numbers as classes of classes, according to which the number two, for example, is the class of all two-membered classes—i.e., the set of all sets that have two members.)

Facts containing two verbs. This is Russell’s favored way of taking about what others came to refer to most often as “propositional attitudes.” Russell’s standard example is the fact expressed by the proposition “Othello believes that Desdemona loves Cassio.” This proposition can be seen to ascribe to Othello an attitude of belief to the proposition “Desdemona loves Cassio.” More generally, ascriptions of propositional attitudes are statements in which a “that”-clause functions the complement of a verb expressing the attitude, and Russell’s terminology directs attention to the addition of the verb in the “that”-clause to the verb expressing the attitude.

Emphatic particulars. Russell tells you that he has in mind here demonstrative pronouns and analogous words (e.g., “this,” “that,” “here,” “now”). The problem he has mind is that, while these words might refer to many different things (or places or times), in a given use their reference is quite specific. This raises the question of what determines the reference in a given use, and Russell thinks this is a hard question for a “neutral monist” to answer.