On Odell on Russell

Abstract

82 Reviews ON ODELL ON RUSSELL RAy PERKINS Philosophy / Plymouth State College Plymouth, NH 03264-1600, USA PERKRK@EARTHLINK.NET S. Jack Odell. On Russell. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning, 2000. Pp. 90. US$13.95 (pb). S Jack Odell has produced a book on Bertrand Russell's philosophy for • the Wadsworth Philosophers series under the general editorship of Daniel Kolak. It's no easy task to turn out a book on a philosopher of RusReviews 83 sell's complexity in 90 pages. But Odell has done it. The book undertakes to present the main ideas of Russell's philosophy, and to show their meaning by contrast with some of his philosophical contemporaries, including G. E. Moore, Peter Strawson and Ludwig Wittgenstein. It's a worthy undertaking, and Odell presents some good exposition and original critique. Unfortunately, there are several problems with the book, apart from the many typographical errors and erroneous references. One problem~perhaps inevitable in a brief introduction-is omission of- important material. For example, in his first chapter, "The Man", Odell never mentions the City College case nor any of the post-World War II activism--especially Russell's anti-nuclear efforts and his opposition to the war in Vietnam-that helped define his greatness as a man of practical wisdom and public conscience. Sometimes Odell's details are annoyingly inaccurate, as when he says Russell's fourth wife was "over thirty years" younger (she was actually 28 years younger) and that Russell served six months in prison (he served four and a half months). And sometimes when the details are accurate one wonders whether the emphasis is appropriate. For example, his first chapter is only eight pages long, but nearly three pages are devoted to Russell's love affairs (Ottoline Morrell and Helen Dudley) and to reflecting on his alleged psychological shortcomings, especially his "feelings of estrangement from others which bordered on the pathological". More seriously, Odell sometimes seems unaware of important Russellian doctrines. For example, his chapter on ethics begins: "His efforts to develop a theory of ethics are limited to two works, one early in his career, 'The Elements of Ethics' (19IO), based on, as he acknowledges, Moore's Principia Ethica, and one much later, Human Society in Ethics and Politics (1954)." Eight of the chapter's twelve pages are devoted to the first of these, which the author does a decent job of explicating. But he seems oblivious to the fact that Russell repudiated much of his objectivist ethics after 1913, and he completely omits any mention of Russell's subjectivist/emotivist views-according to which moral judgments are outside the realm of science and knowledgewhich dominated Russell's thinking in ethics for the intervening 40 years. From the title of Chapter 4, "The Scope and Limits of Knowledge", one might think that Russell's 1948 book, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits, would be an important focus of the chapter, but it gets barely a mention. Instead Odell takes Russell's epistemic writings as a whole as supposedly revealing that Russell was an advocate of "epistemological scepticism"-there is no knowledge other than sense-data beliefs and analytic judgments---:and proceeds to examine this thesis in the light of Moore's attack in "Four Forms of Scepticism". Odell decides that Moore is unconvincing, but insists that Russell must be wrong because even the sceptic's claims must presuppose 84 Reviews knowledge of definitions (of what his words mean). But the whole exercise (three-fourths of the chapter), though clear and well developed, seems irrelevant to Russell's theory of knowledge. It's true that Russell and Moore differed over which propositions had the highest degree of certainty, but Russell was never· an epistemological sceptic in the sense that he was "forced to adopt Humian [sic] scepticism" (p. 54)· Even in The Problems ofPhilosophy (1912), which Odell cites as evidence of his alleged scepticism, Russell accepts a prio~i .non-demonstrative ?rinciples, !,nclu~i~,g the principle of induction, as provIdmg knowledge (albeIt less than certam) of things beyond experience, including physical objects. Th~ view expres~ed in My Philosophical Development (which Odell shows no eVidence of havmg consulted) is representative: "Everybody...