Preface to the French Edition

Abstract

russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies n.s. 37 (summer 2017): 252–4 The Bertrand Russell Research Centre, McMaster U. issn 0036–01631; online 1913–8032 c:\users\ken\documents\type3701\red\rj 3701 132 red.docx 2017-08-18 10:38 PREFACE TO THE FRENCH EDITION1 Bertrand Russell Nicholas Griffin, Introduction Russell Research Centre / McMaster U. Hamilton, on, Canada l8s 4l6 ngriffin@mcmaster.ca n 1908 a French translation of Russell’s book on Leibniz was published for which Russell wrote a short preface, published here for the first time in English. Russell's early philosophical work initially attracted more professional attention in France than in England. An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry (1897) was widely reviewed and commented upon in France, and a French translation appeared in 1901. In this Russell had the enthusiastic help of Louis Couturat, who had energetically promoted Russell’s work on geometry and, later, on the principles of mathematics in France. But Couturat, rather surprisingly, does not seem to have played a role in having Russell’s book on Leibniz translated. The person who was instrumental in that was Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857–1939). It was he who persuaded French publisher , Félix Alcan, to publish an English translation of Russell’s book and who encouraged Jean Ray (1884–1943), then a student at the Sorbonne, to translate it. He also contributed a preface of his own to the work. Although Lévy-Bruhl is now bestknown for his work on the mentality of “primitive” peoples, he was at the time professor of the history of modern philosophy at the Sorbonne and had written a book on Comte and a history of philosophy in France, as well as L’Allemagne depuis Leibniz (1890). But as a historian of philosophy he fell very much on the historical side of the division between historical and philosophical histories of philosophy that Russell laid out in his preface to the English edition of the Leibniz book. Lévy-Bruhl had consistently argued that philosophical systems should not be studied in isolation from the social, political and intellectual milieu in which they arose, to some degree prefiguring his later socio-anthropological work on “primitive mentality”. All of which makes it the more surprising that he should have taken such an interest in Russell’s book, which places itself firmly on the other side. Russell himself seems to have been unclear about Lévy-Bruhl’s involvement for he asked Ray how he should acknowledge Lévy-Bruhl. In reply Ray provided the wording that Russell used. 1 [La Philosophie de Leibniz, exposé critique par Bertrand Russell, m.a.-f.r.s. Traduit de l’Anglais par Jean Ray and Renée Ray. Avec une Préface de l’Auteur et un AvantPropos par L. Lévy-Bruhl, Professor à la Sorbonne. Paris: Alcan. 1908. Pp. 4, xvi, 233. Reprinted Paris, London and New York: Gordon & Breach, 1970.] f= Preface to the French Edition 253 (Ray also asked Russell to acknowledge his wife as co-translator.) Russell did not take the opportunity the French edition afforded to make changes to the text, as he had done with the French translation of his Foundations of Geometry. His excuse, that he could not take the time away from “another task”, was legitimate enough: he was just beginning to prepare Principia Mathematica for the press. But, as became habitual with him when his book on Leibniz was discussed, he did mention Couturat’s two works on Leibniz which had appeared shortly after his own and which he regarded as confirming his main claim about the centrality of Leibniz’s logic to his philosophy but which, at the same time, led him to accept, what he had denied in his book, that for Leibniz all truths, including contingent ones, are analytic . This is the one substantive matter discussed in the French preface. It is explained in more detail in his review of Couturat’s La Logique de Leibniz (Papers 4: 24) and in the preface to the second English edition (1937) of A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz. No manuscript of the preface is known. he present...