The Problems of Philosophy

Philosophers seek to answer big questions about how humans perceive the external world and whether knowledge is concrete. Russell uses the table he sits at as he writes as an example of appearance and reality. His setting is simple: a desk with some papers on it. He assumes that anyone walking into the room would see the same desk that he is seeing and recognize the same qualities that he does: rectangular, brown, and smooth. However, he notes how the light coming in from the window changes the color of the desk in some spots and acknowledges that another person walking through the room will see the light fall on the desk differently from him. Russell asserts that there is no singular color indicative of the reality of the table: “It appears to be of different colours from different points of view, and there is no reason for regarding some of these as more really its colour than others” (2). How one person perceives the table at one point in the room is vastly different from how another perceives it at a different point. The light falls in a different way, causing the two individuals’ experiences of the color of the table to be individualized and