E ditor’s Notes
Contributors ¶charles pigden is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Otago, the author of the Stanford Encyclopedia article on Russell’s ethics, and the editor of Russell on Ethics. He has a special interest in the ethics of Russell and Moore, Hume and the Is/Ought question, and the philosophy of conspiracy theories. graham stevens is Reader in Philosophy at the University of Manchester. He is the author of The Russellian Origins of Analytical Philosophy (2005) and The Theory of Descriptions: Russell and the Philosophy of Language (2011). Recent publications are “Wittgenstein and Russell” in The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy: a Companion to Wittgenstein and “Russell on Denoting and Language” in The Bloomsbury Companion to Bertrand Russell. His current interests include the interaction between descriptive and expressive semantic content. michael rush is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Birmingham, uk. He is interested in the metaphysics of processes and recently published “Motivating Propositional Gratitude” in Philosophical Studies and coauthored Philosophy: Why It Matters (Polity, 2019). russell wahl is Professor of Philosophy at Idaho State University. He is the editor of The Bloomsbury Companion to Bertrand Russell and has published many articles on Russell and analytic philosophy. He has also worked on Descartes, Arnauld and Malebranche, and has a recent piece on syllogism in the Port-Royal Logic. He reviewed Russell’s Leibniz issue in The Leibniz Review. lukas spencer was an undergraduate assistant with the Russell Archives in McMaster Library’s Archives and Research Collections since 2018 and is transferring to the Russell Research Centre. marley beach is an undergraduate assistant with the Russell Research Centre. giovanni duarte de carvalho is an independent scholar residing in Brazil who is interested in all aspects of Russell’s life and works. harry ruja (1912–2002) was a Professor of Philosophy at San Diego State University and coauthor of A Bibliography of Bertrand Russell (1994). He edited the two volumes of Russell’s Hearst columns, Mortals and Others. john g. slater is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He is a founding editor of the Collected Papers, of which he edited five volumes. your editor continues to revise the Russell Bibliography, which has a new format, and continues his editing of Collected Papers 24 and 25.
150th Anniversary ¶In 2022 it will be the 150th anniversary of Bertrand Russell’s birth—a good point at which to re-evaluate his legacy. McMaster will mark the occasion, and the Bertrand Russell Society plans to meet at McMaster at the same time.
Russell Research Centre ¶Nicholas Griffin, Professor of Philosophy, Director of the Russell Research Centre and General Editor of the Collected Papers, retired in June 2019. He has been appointed Scholar in Residence at the Bertrand Russell Archives. His next contribution to Russell is titled “A Sexist Joke in Principia Mathematica”. The new Director is Alexander Klein, Associate Professor of Philosophy, who comes to McMaster from California State University, Long Beach.
Forthcoming Books ¶Larry D. Harwood, Mad about Belief: Religion in the Life and Thought of Bertrand Russell (Wipf and Stock). Dr. Harwood recently researched in the Russell Archives. Russell’s non-technical papers of 1950–52 are being readied for publication as Collected Papers 26 (Routledge); the editor is Andrew G. Bone.
Brixton Letters ¶The first installment of the Collected Letters has new historical support. Both of Russell’s prison terms are covered in Christopher Impey’s The House on the Hill: Brixton: London’s Oldest Prison (Tangerine P., 2019). More letter transcriptions were added.
New Books ¶Jonathan Hockey has independently published A Journey through 20th Century Philosophy: from Russell to Searle. Daniel Grandbois published in 2016 an imaginative work, A Revised Poetry of Western Philosophy (U. of Pittsburgh P.), with Russell on the cover.
Open Access to E-Russell ¶Except for the
latest four issues (vols. 37,2 to 39,1), Russell is
on open access at mulpress.mcmaster.ca/russelljournal/.
Recent Acquisitions ¶Churchill College Archives has kindly provided scans of Russell’s correspondence with Joseph Rotblat and the many Pugwash scientists with whom Russell was in touch. He generally passed the correspondence to Rotblat for answering on specific issues and arrangements, and did not keep copies. The letters are partly catalogued in bracers. We picked up a 1959 letter from the National Jewish Hospital in Denver. On it Russell handwrote his agreement to their being supplied with a copy of Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare.
An Unwritten Chapter of HWP ¶The manuscript for A History of Western Philosophy has already yielded a longish text on Pythagoras (Russell, 2001). An outline reveals Russell’s early intention to conclude the book with a chapter called “The Revival of Superstition”. It could well have been on Fascism and supporting ideologies.
bracers.mcmaster.ca ¶The Russell Archives’ annotated catalogue of letters totalled 132,131 records by 21 August 2019, an increase of 529. Many more are expected when Russell Archives 4 is processed. More than a correspondence catalogue, it’s been suggested that manuscripts, bibliographical entries and memorabilia be included. Already bracers houses drafts of annotated, scholarly transcriptions of texts.