A New Companion to Russell Studies

Abstract

russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies n.s.  (summer ): – The Bertrand Russell Research Centre, McMaster U. issn –; online – c:\users\ken\documents\rj\type\red\rj   red.docx -- : PM Reviews A NEW COMPANION TO RUSSELL STUDIES Aaron Preston Philosophy / Valparaiso U. Valparaiso, in –, usa aaron.preston@valpo.edu Russell Wahl, ed. The Bloomsbury Companion to Bertrand Russell. London and NewYork: Bloomsbury Academic, . Pp. xviii, . us$. (hb). isbn: -----. his Companion is a most welcome guide, both to the thought of Bertrand Russell himself, and also to the evolving fields of Russell scholarship and the history of analytic philosophy, at the points where the two intersect.The book is comprised of fourteen essays covering not only the main areas of Russell ’s thought, but also some important historical and socio-disciplinary dimensions of Russell’s intellectual life. It also includes a helpful timeline of key events in Russell’s life, and a comprehensive and up-to-date bibliography of works by and about Russell. Every last essay is top-notch. Every last essay is top-notch, and adds something new and interesting to our understanding of Russell’s thought. I can’t hope to do justice to any of them, let alone all of them, in this review.While I will try to say something informative about each one, limits both of space and of my own interests and competencies mean that I will end up saying more about some than others. The volume is divided into two parts, which I will discuss in turn. Part , “Russell in Context”, consists in five essays discussing Russell’s connections with British idealism (James Levine), Pragmatism (Cheryl Misak), Frege and Meinong (Bernard Linsky),Wittgenstein (Russell Wahl), and the Vienna Circle (François Schmitz). Levine’s chapter provides a detailed discussion of the ways in which Russell ’s engagement with British idealism influenced his philosophical development , beginning with his foray into idealism itself, moving on to Moorean realism, and finally into his post-Peano period. Of special interest to me was Levine’s discussion of the specific form of the ontological argument that famously converted Russell to Hegelianism. Why anyone would accept the soundness of any given form of the ontological argument is often a matter of T  Reviews c:\users\ken\documents\rj\type\red\rj   red.docx -- : PM great puzzlement, even for theists.Whether one finds such an argument compelling usually turns upon the ontological assumptions one brings to it, rather than the logic of the argument itself. So it was with Russell, who accepted it on the basis of a Bradleian view of the ontology of judgment. But this is just a single point in a very rich chapter exploring how idealism exerted an ongoing influence on Russell’s thinking in many different areas, including the nature of simples, propositions, relations, meaning, understanding, knowledge, time, magnitude, number and the nature of philosophy itself. Misak’s chapter successfully complicates the standard view that Russell “was resolutely antagonistic to pragmatism” (p. ). She demonstrates that his objections to pragmatism were directed mainly at the versions endorsed by Schiller, Dewey and above allWilliam James, but that Russell thought very highly of C. S. Pierce, and had leanings of his own that could be construed as “pragmatist” in nature. In fact, Ramsey claimed to embrace a pragmatism derived from Russell himself.What he meant, Misak explains, was that Russell endorsed “the pragmatist idea that a belief is a habit or disposition to behave, and can be evaluated as such” (p. ). One wonders, though, whether this ought to be described as a “pragmatist idea,” given that it originated with Alexander Bain, who is usually thought of as a “British Empiricist”, and that, as Misak discusses, it can be taken in a more extreme, behaviourist direction or a more moderate, pragmatist direction.That matter aside, Misak proceeds to discuss Russell’s visit to Harvard in .There his familiarity with Piercean pragmatism deepened through interactions with faculty and students, especially Josiah Royce, who was then recasting his personalistic idealism in light of Pierce’s theory of meaning. Misak shows that Russell’s time at Harvard gave him “a new, positive thought about what is good in...