Acquaintance, Knowledge, and Logic. Bernard Linsky and Donovan Wishon (eds.). Copyright © 2014, CSLI Publications. 131 7 Problems as Prolegomena: Russell’s Analytic Phenomenology ROBERT BARNARD 1 Introduction The Problems of Philosophy (hereafter POP) appeared in 1912. It was the product of a period of philosophical reflection that represented an ‘es- cape from the rigors of symbolic-deductive reasoning’ that had marked Russell’s work on Principia Mathematica (hereafter PM). The difference from PM style philosophy is further seen in the fact that rather than rushing headlong into the virtues and uses of plainly logical methods, as he would later do in Chapter II (‘Logic as the Essence of Philosophy’) of Our Knowledge of the External World (1914), in POP Russell chose to begin and motivate his ‘general outline’ of philosophy with the Cartesian question ‘Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?’ This epistemological program was further developed in what is now called the 1913 Theory of Knowledge (hereafter TK) manu- script. At almost the same time, Edmund Husserl was laying the foundations for the philosophical movement he called ‘Phenomenology’. Like Russell, Husserl had spent many years working on problems in the philosophy of mathematics and, also like Russell, his work was influenced by interaction with Frege. Again like Russell, Husserl was motivated by something akin to the Cartesian problem. My focus in this paper is to consider how deep these roots of these surface similarities go. To that end, I will offer an opinionated comparison of Husserlian Phenomenology and Russell’s epistemological