Russell's Logical Atomism, by David Bostock.

Abstract

Hearing people talk, you would think Russell was ‘a big numpty’ (to use the Scottish phrase), a second-rate thinker compared to Frege or Wittgenstein. All this goes back to the Tractatus where Wittgenstein took pains to contrast ‘the great works of Frege’, and implicitly his own, with ‘the works of my friend Bertrand Russell’, providing an impression of their relative merits that happens to have stuck. But is it obvious that Russell was second rate compared to them? Hasn’t Russell’s philosophy of logic and mathematics, and his epistemology and metaphysics, had a deep and abiding influence upon all of us? Conjure before your mind an alternative history bereft of his influence: one where Russell never emerged from the bath of German idealism in which he had been plunged by McTaggart and Stout, so twentieth century philosophy proceeded absent an appreciation of either Russell’s paradox or his theory of descriptions. That is an intellectual dystopia, if anything is.