B ibliographies, A rchival I nventories, I ndexes

 

 

A SECONDARY BIBLIOGRAPHY OF
A HISTORY OF WESTERN PHILOSOPHY

PART I: EXTRACTED REVIEWS IN ENGLISH

 

Kenneth Blackwell

blackwk@mcmaster.ca

 

Giovanni D. de Carvalho

giovanniduarte@gmail.com

 

Harry Ruja

 

 

Introduction by john g. slater

jgs@gmail.com

 

was struck by the fact that none of the reviewers cited in the reception article seemed to know how Russell came to write this book. When war broke out he was stuck in the United States with no way of making a living. He had just been denied a position teaching logic and the philosophy of mathematics at the College of the City of New York by a bigoted judge who claimed his appointment would establish “a chair of indecency”. He had resigned from the University of California at Los Angeles to take the New York position, and now no college or university would have him. His situation was increasingly becoming desperate. A saviour appeared in the shape of Albert C. Barnes who had founded and continued to run an art appreciation school near Philadelphia. He offered Russell a five-year contract to deliver one lecture per week to his students on the history of philosophy beginning with the ancient Greeks and ending with Russell’s own philosophy. The pay was $8,000 per year. The clear understanding was that Russell’s lectures were to provide background for the really important aim of the school, namely, the cultivation of the appreciation of art, especially painting. The intent from the start was to embed the views of a given philosopher in the cultural characteristics of his time. Russell was obliged to provide background lectures on historical periods for the students. He was, as a matter of fact, teaching an introduction to philosophy course using its history as its structure.

With his wife Patricia’s help, Russell took a farmhouse in rural Pennsyl-vania and got down to work. He faced the daunting task of deciding how much time to spend on each period and each prominent figure in that period. These decisions determined the time that would be available for research on each topic and each philosopher. Once a lecture, say on Plotinus, was written, typed, and delivered (or delivered and then typed), it was filed away, and it was on to the next one. He had, of course, a lifetime of study to draw upon and at ucla he had been teaching a course entitled “Philosophic Ideas in Practice” with a similar sweep.[1] It is hardly surprising that Russell to fill the gaps in his knowledge found himself relying on secondary works.

What would have happened to his completed lectures had Barnes not fired him we will never know. What we do know is that when he was fired, because the notoriously prickly Barnes who attended his lectures hated the sound of Patricia’s knitting needles, he faced the necessity of making money. Completing the history project seemed the quickest way. Because of his fame the book would probably sell well, and it did. The extraordinary number of reviews is testimony of its wide appeal.

Had a leading university offered him a professorship in competition with Barnes I feel sure he would have taken it, and his History would never have been written. As we know from his discussion in his Leibniz book of how the history of philosophy should be approached, this book does not measure up, but his thousands of readers are thankful he departed from his preferred path and recorded some of his opinions on his philosophical ancestors for posterity.

 

 

Extracts from the more academic reviews in English follow. They are representative of the totality rather than of individual reviews. Those in the popular press indicate Russell’s high reputation in the mid-1940s but little else. Excluded are blurbs from the Allen & Unwin dustjacket, and there were none on the Simon and Schuster jacket. Einstein wrote a blurb-like paragraph,[2] but its early use has not been traced. Copies of all but one of these 132 reviews are in box 1.65 of the Bertrand Russell Archives (only that by “V.C.C.” is lacking); they are also preserved in ra as pdfs. Abbreviations for the holdings are: ra = original clipping from Russell; ra′ = clipping added to ra; ra″ = photo­copy. Reviews in other languages will be extracted in a future issue.

The complaint that Russell’s reading and referencing were inadequate can be set against Dawn Ogden and A. D. Irvine’s “A Bibliographical Index to Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy”, Russell 19 (1999): 63–83. The History’s political aims, noted in some reviews, remain unexplored systematically, as do his manuscript and notes. Collation with the print editions would reveal Russell’s improvements while awaiting uk publication and his response to reviews and correspondence detailing errors. Publication of his outlines and reading notes would show his preparation for evaluating hundreds of philosophical arguments and describing their historical context.

 

Figure 1  Folio 2 of the manuscript of A History of Western Philosophy. File ra1 210.006657–f1. Revisions were made for the first edition.

 

 

Allers, Rudolf. “Book Three: Modern Philosophy”. Franciscan Studies 7 (June 1947): 220–42. ra″. “The author fails utterly to fulfill what the title of his book seemed to prom­ise.” “[T]he disregard the author displays for many figures which were of definite importance for the devel­opment of political thought.” “Several systems and per­son­alities are labelled as ‘mad’ or ‘insane.’” “Rus­sell’s own ideas might be described, perhaps, as a mixture of Stoicism, Human­itarianism, and the ideal of the gentleman.” “One wonders that not more emphasis is laid on Descartes’ ideas on mathematics as the foundation of all knowledge.” “Russell denies simply, in spite of evidence to the contrary, that Spinoza depended on medieval, primarily Jewish, philosophy.” “The presentation of Leibniz’ notion of the possible is inadequate.…” “Among the many currents of ideas which Russell is unable to understand correctly, Roman­ticism stands foremost.” “[O]ne is not permitted to treat Hegel as if he actually did not know what he was saying.” “He has a curious kind of humor, ironical sometimes, which makes him use occasionally expressions and illustrations a little strange in a work on philosophy … two limer­icks.…” “Too bad, he seems to say, that Leibniz or Spinoza, Kant or Hegel, did not employ the methods of logical analysis.”

 

Anonymous. “A New History of Philosophy”. The Advertiser, Adelaide, 12 April 1947, p. 10. ra″.

——. “Bertrand Russell’s View of His­tory of Philosophy”. Globe-Demo­crat, St. Louis, 28 Oct. 1945. ra′.

——. “Books People Are Reading”. Sunday Express, 2 Dec. 1946. ra.

——. “Here’s History of Philosophy, Some American Groups to Voice Objections”. Appeal, Memphis, tn, 8 Dec. 1945. ra′.

——. “History of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell”. Springfield Republican, ma, 11 Nov. 1945, p. 4d. ra′.

——. [By the editor]. “Men’s Minds”. John O’London’s Weekly 56 (13 Dec. 1946): 129–30. ra.

——. “Mr. Bertrand Russell’s ‘History of Wes­tern Philosophy’ — Outstanding Book of Reference”. Public Opinion, 7 Jan. 1947. ra.

 

——. “Philosophy and Mr. Russell”. Church Times, 6 Dec. 1946, p. 737. ra. “His dislike of organized Christianity ap­pears in his uncritical acceptance of Gib­bon’s judgments on early Church history … [b]ut his views on ethics are much closer to the Christian principle.”

 

——. “Philosophy with Salt”. Newsweek, 12 Nov. 1945, p. 106. ra′.

——. “The Reasons behind Ideals”. Atlanta Journal, 4 Nov. 1945. ra′.

 

——. “School for Philosophers; a Stim­ulating History”. The Times Educational Sup­­ple­ment, 21 Dec. 1946, p. 626. ra, ra″. “The most weighty and perhaps most valuable section of the work is that which deals with the ancient philosophers.” “[T]he omission of Goethe is hardly to be excused.”

 

——. “Some Books That Will Help and Amuse You”. Aberdeen Press and Journal, 25 Jan. 1947, p. 2. ra″

——. “Western Ways of Thought”. The Scots­­man, 28 Nov. 1946. ra″.

——. “What Is the Good of Philosophy?”. News Review, 21 Nov. 1946, p. 33. ra′.

——. “The Whole Field of Philosophic Thought”. Glasgow Herald, 6 Feb. 1947. ra′.

——. Contemporary Review 206 (1965): 334. ra″.

——. The Listener 36 (12 Dec. 1946): 852. ra. “The philosophers are made the more real by the criticism to which he sub­mits them, and the jokes he makes at their expense.…” “The social determinants of the more modest logical positivists are not disclosed.”

 

——. Methodist Recorder, 5 Dec. 1946. ra.

——. Quarterly Review 285 (April 1947): 339–40. ra″.

——. Queen, 25 Dec. 1946. ra.

——. Time 46, no. 25 (17 Dec. 1945): 96. ra′, ra″.

 

Arnold, G. L. “The Philosophy of Liberal­ism”. Tribune, 20 Dec. 1946, pp. 14–15. ra′. “Russell, who, like any other advanced liberal, has no hesitation in say­ing that his outlook ‘has been influenced by Marx,’ emphasises throughout that systems of thought mirror the conditions of their epoch.” “[P]hilosophy plays the part of critic of established values, but not that of a constructive social force on the political plane.” “This [liberalism] is orthodox Rad­i­calism, but it is a little surprising to find it coupled with a near Spenglerian faith in historical cycles.” “It is not Russell’s fault that this fascinating book fails to satisfy the deeper urge for a guide out of the present chaos.”

 

“Auster.” “Bertrand Russell’s History of Phi­losophy”. The Argus, Melbourne, 25 Jan. 1947, p. 13. ra″.

B., D. “Bertrand Russell and Everyman”. The Sydney Morning Herald, 15 March 1947, p. 10. ra″.

 

B., E. S. Sociology and Social Research 30 (1946): 411. ra″. “[Some] will question his rule of giving space to a philosopher, not on the score of the worth of his ideas, but on the score of his influence.”

 

Basso, Hamilton. “Wisdom Week”. New Yorker 21, no. 36 (20 Oct. 1945): 106, 109–10. ra, ra″. “What I especially like is the way he has shown the influence of certain men who are not philosophers in the formal sense of the word—Machiavelli, Rousseau, and Byron, for example—upon philosophical thought—as well as upon liter­ature, taste, manners, and politics.” “… I feel sure that many professional philosophers will want to quarrel with him on almost every page—in particular the Neo-Thomists and the modern subjective philosophers.”

 

Baylis, Charles A. “Bertrand Russell’s ‘History’ at Once Takes Top Place in Its Field”. Providence Journal, 11 Nov. 1945. ra′.

 

Berlin, Isaiah. Mind 56 (Apr. 1947): 151–66. ra″. Reprinted in A. D. Irvine, ed., Bertrand Russell: Critical As­sess­ments (London and New York: Rout­ledge, 1999), 4: 49–64. “It is a popular work, designed for the general reader, and since it is written in clear and elegant and vigorous prose, with that peculiar combination of moral con­viction and inexhaustible intellectual fer­tility which in some measure charac­terises all, even the most ephemeral, of Rus­sell’s writings, the general reader may be accounted fortunate.” “[I]t is scarcely likely to be of great help to him [the pro­fessional philosopher] in his own think­ing.” “Its principal value and interest—the reas­on for which it will, in the main, be read—resides in the light which it casts upon the views of its author.” “[H]is technical writ­ings are sufficiently important, to entitle any work by him to the attention of phi­losophers in its own right … I shall do my best to offer some guidance to the pro­spective profes­sional reader.” “[I]t does at least possess the rare and very important virtue of treating the great thinkers of the past as excep­tionally intel­ligent persons who uttered rational propo­sitions of sufficient intrinsic interest to be still worthy of dis­cussion on their own merits.” “[T]he Theae­tetus of­fers an admirable occasion for a discussion of the relation of knowledge to perception which the author puts to excellent advan­tage. His method consists in reveal­ing his own views by contrast to those which particularly irritate him in Plato.” “[T]he unconditional nature of duty, of virtue as its own reward … one of the deepest of all Western modes of feeling, is for him merely crabbed puritanism.” “Every belief and attitude is required to justify itself before the bar of reason: the critical intelligence is not to be taken in by systems built on, and held fast by, faith or revealed mysteries.” “In­stead, in the midst of various historico-theological obscurities, we suddenly come out of the mediæval wood with an illum­inating fragment on the principle of indi­viduation.” “[T]he absence of those ana­chronistic attributions with which modern writers occasionally excite and mislead their readers.…” “The exposition of his system, although it is scarcely likely to satisfy Spin­ozists, is a scrupulous and in places moving attempt to reconstruct the vision of man and the universe provided by rationalism at its best and purest.” “A further gap [in the account of induc­tion] in Russell’s treatment of Hume is his omission of that philosopher’s view of mem­ory, upon which also his own work has drawn so fruitfully.” “Kant is treated in greater detail, and once more Russell follows his preferred and some­what Napoleonic method of concen­trating his fire against the position on which he regards the enemy as strongest, leaving the rest to collapse and vanish of itself.” “In his treatment of the later nineteenth century, Russell shows a breadth of imagination and freedom from pedantry in deciding to treat of Schopen­hauer, Nietzsche, and Marx in preference to the Lotzes, Sigwarts and Renouviers (and for that matter the British Idealists too).…” “[T]hose sharp generali­sations and shrewd and ironical aphorisms of which Russell is the greatest living master.” “Russell’s own later doctrines and those of his followers in the fields of philosophy proper (i.e. logical positivism), of ‘seman­tics’, and of mathematical logic, are treated inade­quately—no reader of this book could possibly discover from it how great was the part played by Russell himself in the dis­covery and dissemination of these new and revolutionary doctrines.…” “Rus­sell’s own intellectual achievement is so remark­able that future historians of thought will in due course begin to apply to his thought and personality all those canons of scrupulous historical and philosophical scho­l­arship to which the most eminent among his predeces­sors have been submitted.”

——. “Philosophy”. The British Book News 1947 (London: Longmans, Green, 1949), pp. 534–5. ra″. “His remarks on the progress of science and mathematics, throughout the enormous period which the book covers, and his discussion, from the standpoint of deeply liberal and rationalist convictions, of such topics as the influence of Sparta and of the Roman outlook on the ancient and modern world, are particularly illuminating.” “[P]erhaps the best account of the Rationalist thinkers, and particularly of Spinoza and Leibniz, in any modern English history of philosophy.”

 

Berthel, John H. Library Journal 70 (1945): 978. ra″.

 

Blanshard, Brand. Yale Review 35 (Spring 1946): 568–70. ra″. “What we cannot get anywhere else, even in the most learned of previous histories, is such a magazine of shrewd, penetrating and inci­sive appraisals.” “One of Russell’s strong­est convictions is that for a thinker to allow his feeling to color his judgment is his special occupational immorality.”

 

Boas, George. Journal of the History of Ideas 8 (Jan. 1947): 117–23. ra″. “He [Boas] can recall clearly the impres­sion made upon him as a lieutenant of infantry by a book called Why Men Fight.” “But when Lord Russell comes to Leib­niz, about whom he certainly knows more than most men writing to-day, he spends five pages out of the ten given to exegesis on Leibniz’s unpublished works, which could have had no influence until they were printed by Couturat.” “The historical work of Love­joy, like that of Cherniss, is completely over-looked and consequently Lord Russell’s treat­ment of Thomism and Romanticism, to pick out only two items which would have been improved by a study of The Great Chain of Being and various articles of Lovejoy, is hopelessly out of date.”

 

Bonner, Mrs. J. W. “Russell’s History of Philosophy Is Book of Supreme Im­por­­tance”. St. Petersburg Times, fa, 5 Jan. 1947. ra′.

“Bookworm, The”. “Western Philos­o­phy; Bertrand Russell’s History”. The West Australian, 18 Jan. 1947, p. 5. ra″.

 

Broad, C. D. Philosophy 22 (Nov. 1947): 256–64. ra″. “The antipathy [to Plato] seems to be based primarily on poli­tical grounds, and secondarily (I suspect), on annoyance with the almost uninter­rupted stream of praise which Plato has received from scholars throughout the ages.” “He says that both St. Augustine and Karl Marx took over the Jewish theory of world-history, past and future. The for­mer adapted it to Christianity, and the latter to Socialism.” “But he points out that it is easy for us to over-estimate the impor­tance of Western Europe, and that during our dark ages there flourished the brilliant T’ang dynasty in China and the brilliant Islamic civilization.” “… Lord Russell must have breathed a sigh of relief to be at last out of the enchanted wood of the Middle Ages.…” “[Hobbes] needs to be supple­mented by a theory of conflicts between classes within each state, and a theory of international relations.” “He thinks that the classical arguments for the existence of God have been better stated by Leibniz than by any other philosopher, and so he examines them carefully in this place.” “The chapter on Kant … seems to me to be the worst in the book.” “The chapter on Hegel contains a clear, and it seems to me a fair, critical account of his main views.” “[A] chapter on Nietz­sche, which seems to me to be admirable … treating Nietzsche’s views with fairness and comprehension.” “[H]e would like to refute Nietzsche’s ethics, which is profoundly distasteful to him, and this leads to an inter­esting general discussion of the senses in which an ethical system is open to refu­tation.” “Sometimes the temptation to ‘score off’ an ancient or mediaeval thinker by appealing to the tacitly assumed and uncriticized liberal-democratic prejudices of contemporary England and America has proved too strong for Lord Russell’s his­torical con­science.” “[T]he almost complete lack of references is a serious defect in the book.…”

 

Burnham, James. “Home Is Where One Starts From”. Partisan Review 13 (1946): 105–8. ra″. “The many pages of social and political history might just as well be bound separately. He never discloses any but obvious and long known correla­tions between soci­eties and their philos­ophies.” “The doc­trine of ‘analogy,’ a key to the medieval mind and culture, is not even men­tioned.” “Russell, it is revealing to ob­serve, treats seriously only Augustine’s views on space and time—views of tech­nical importance, possibly, to a prac­tising met­aphysician, but of almost no historical sig­nificance.” “Rus­sell returns to his roots, in his philo­sophical values as in his actions.”

 

C., V. C. Clare Market Review 42, no. 2 (Xmas 1946): 38–9.

Carroll, J. F. “Russell Reviews Western Thought”. Journal Herald, Dayton, oh, 15 Dec. 1945. ra′.

Clark, Dale. “Philosophy Outlined by Russell”. San Diego Union, 18 Nov. 1945. ra′.

 

Collins, James. “Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy; Book Two, i: Catholic Philosophy”. Francis­can Studies 7 (June 1947): 193–219. ra″. “What is usually taken to be general history thus holds a more prominent place in Rus­sell’s volume than in any previous study of medieval philosophy.” “They pres­ent the view­point of an educated English­man who has conveniently at hand his Cam­bridge Medieval History, Gibbon, Lea, White, Cumont, Lecky, some edition of Ueberweg and the Encyclopædia Bri­tannica.” “The religious motive never emerges in its own right, but is consistently interpreted in terms of ecclesiastical power.” “The investiga­tions was [sic] carried on then just as tech­nically as it is today by a logical analyst.” “No one has stated these require­ments better than Russell himself. He remarks (39) that our initial attitude in studyjng a philosopher should be neither reverence nor contempt, but hypothetical sympathy.” “Independent and disinterested philosophizing had to await the liberation of the Western mind from Catholic dogma. This judgment by Rus­sell probably will be more widely approved in America than any other stand taken in the History.” “The agnostic hero­ism of ‘a free man’s worship’ still dominates the author’s outlook, leading him to confuse edifying with expedient con­sequences.” “The inadequacy of his clearcut division of Catholic thinkers into Platonic Fathers and Aristotelian School­men is also evident in his remarks on medieval Platon­ism (143, 418).” “[I]t is made to appear that modern philosophy made a clean break with Scholasticism and owed nothing to its predecessors.” “Bravely ignoring the schol­arship of half a century, Russell revives the Boethius familiar to readers of Gibbon.” “With respect to Aquinas, Russell seems to have taken too much to heart his own advice to readers that they can come to know Spinoza without bothering to master the details of his demonstrations (572).” “Indeed, no philos­o­phy antedating Rus­sell’s own logical analysis is basically sound from the new logical viewpoint.” “Yet he has set some sort of record in explaining both Aquinas and all other Catholic phi­losophers without a single mention of the notion of analogy!” [Proofs of the existence of God and the alleged impossibility of series with no first term are discussed.] “[T]he practical result of denying the ascertain­ability of absolute val­ues is that one facil­itates the rise of those types of ethi­cal and political doctrine which Lord Rus­sell himself dislikes.” “[W]hen it comes to dogmatism, the logical positivists and their fellow-travellers are the equal of anybody.”

 

Copleston, Frederick C. The Wind and the Rain 4 (Summer 1947): 57–62. ra″. “[T]his remarkable book.” “It is always interesting, it is written in a human and a lively way, and it is often illuminated by acute and sometimes humorous obser­vations.” “[I]ts demerits are no less impor­tant.” “[H]e gives the impression that Fichte meant by the Absolute Ego the indi­vidual ego.…”

 

Cournos, John. “Bertrand Russell Re­gards Thinkers with Skepticism”. Register, New Haven, 21 Oct. 1945. ra′.

 

Cross, R. Nicol. “Bertrand Russell’s His­tory of Western Philosophy”. The Hibbert Journal 45 (1947): 193–201. ra″. “Those of us whose youth was fed on the heavy indigestible stuff of Erdmann will relish the plain homely fare Russell often serves.…” “[T]o live without certainty and yet escape the paralysis of hesitation (11). We had thought this was pre-eminently the function of faith, necessary in life, where often he who hesitates is lost, and of hypoth­esis indispensable in science.” “The historian should criticise systems in the historical context of their own philosophical period.” “Russell has his oracular mo­ments, his times of visitation from the im­mortal gods when reason does its imperfect work by merg­ing into insight—or dare we say mys­tical intuition.…”

 

Cunningham, G. Watts. Philosophical Re­view 55 (1946): 694–8. ra″. “[T]hese systems are treated only as flimsy structures grounded in assumptions which modern logical analysis has disclosed to be false, and not as substantial arguments.…” “For here the genuine philosophers are said to be those ‘who make logical analysis the main business of philosophy’ and who, unlike the system-builders, have achieved methods like those of science by which alone philosophical knowledge, in so far as it is possible at all, must be sought; but beyond the reach of such methods lies the vast field, traditionally included in philosophy, of the problems of value and the truth of religious dogmas which are, consequently, not only insoluble and discussion of them futile but also even nonsensical and discussion of them quite unbecoming to a serious-minded and enlightened philosopher.”

 

D., R. A. “The Mind of Europe”. Co-operative News, 28 Dec. 1946. ra.

 

Demos, Raphael. “A Remarkable His­tory off the Beaten Path”. New York Her­ald Tribune, 4 Nov. 1946, sec. 7, p. 3. ra′. “Russell seems fonder of Dewey than 0f any other philosopher.” “There is a very interesting, although brief, account of Irish culture in the Dark Ages.” “[A]n astonishing achievement in terms of labor and energy alone.” “This broadening of scope leads to surprising revaluations.” “Anyone who has met Mr. Russell knows that when he enters a room everything lights up. Something like that has happened in this book.”

 

Denecke, Charles, sj. Best Sellers: a Bi-Weekly Review, 5 (1945): 159–60. ra″.

 

Denonn, Lester E. Philosophic Abstracts 5, nos. 19–20 (Spring 1946): 12–13. ra″. “[T]here appears throughout an authoritative and brilliant critical discus­sion that gives the reader, what he can obtain from few other histories of philos­ophy, the insights of one of the world’s lead­ing thinkers as he reacts upon that history and its leading figures.” “[There] are sum­maries of his own views as occasion arises for him to expound them. We have here Russell on description, on empiricism, on the import of induction, on the philosophy of relativity, on mathematical logic, on uni­versals, on metaphysics, epistemology and on ethics, a fitting and crowning summary of his position.”

 

Durant, Will. “Will Durant Calls Rus­sell’s History of Western Philosophy an Intellectual World Event—Keen, Subtle and Brilliant!” New York Post, 6 Dec. 1945, p. 1b. ra′. Shortened in Wash­ington Post, 5 Dec. 1946. ra′. Shor­tened further in Chicago Sun, 2 Dec. 1945, sec. 5, p. 36. ra′. “He has his own opinion about everything, and considers traditional judgments merely as the easy prey of his dialectical mind.” “Theologies are handled with scimitars, but a good word for religion startles the reader now and then.” “There are repetitions now and then, due pre­sum­ably to a labor of composition that must have taken many years and must have suf­fered many interruptions by love and war.” “God knows we have had speci­alists long enough; without perspective we shall lose the ends in the means, and blow ourselves up with our own cleverness.”

 

Edman, Irwin. “A History of Western Phi­losophy”. Book of the Month, Aug. 1947. ra′. “[T]here is unusual atten­tion to the backgrounds of history, politics and general culture, and unusual attention to human motives in philosophy, unex­pected sympathy with some mystics like the Greek Plotinus and some medieval think­ers. It is not an important new history of phil­osophy.…”

——, Horace M. Kallen and Harold A. Taylor. [Discussion of HWP.] Invita­tion to Learn­ing, session 301, 15 Sept. 1946. Broad­cast by cbs. Discs in ra. [See the trans­cription in this issue.]

 

Eisler, Robert. The Nineteenth Century and After 140 (Oct. 1946): 233–6. ra″. “But it is amply justified to consider all the errors professed by humanity in the course of its historic evolution, including all its political ‘ideologies’ without exception and all the judgements of value ever pro­nounced by men, as products of ‘wishful thinking’ and to relate all the wishes and desires of individuals and social groups to their respective biographical and socio­log­ical cir­cum­­stances. Because this is so, the reader will be particularly grateful to the author for having given more space to such consid­erations than one is accustomed to find in books of this kind.” “[T]he reviewer cannot help to find it odd, that a whole page should have been devoted to William James’s article Does Consciousness Exist? denying—in 1904—that the subject-object relation is fundamental, and not one word to the far more profound and much earlier Analysis of Sensations by Ernst Mach and the Criticism of Pure Expe­rience by Richard Avenarius.…”

 

Elie, Rudolph, Jr. “Historical and Analytical Discussion of Philosophy”. Boston Herald, 21 Nov. 1945. ra′.

 

Freeman, Joseph. Tomorrow, Feb. 1946, pp. 71–2. ra′. “His knowledge of mathematics and logic is vast, his sense of history weak.” “It is equally ridiculous to denounce Rousseau as a forerunner of Hitler when the effect of his ideas for a century was to liberate men from authoritarian prin­­­ciples.” “In grappling with anarchy, Russell argues, the modern world seems to be moving toward a solution like that of antiquity: a social order imposed by force, representing the will of the powerful rather than the hopes of common men. He does not like that solution; but if it must be, then he suggests that the problem of a durable and satisfactory social order can only be solved by combining the solidity of the Roman Empire with the idealism of St. Augustine’s City of God.” “[A] profound and exciting edu­cation in first and last things, an inspir­ation to do our own thinking in a world which desperately needs thought to sur­vive a crisis.”

 

Fuller, Adrian. “Thought of Ages Col­lected”. Detroit Free Press, 2 Dec. 1945. ra′.

——. [as A. F.] “The New Books”. San Francisco Chronicle, 9 Dec. 1945. ra′.

 

Gillis, James M., csp. “What Bertrand Russell Thinks”. Catholic News, 16 March 1946. ra′. Issued as a press release by the National Catholic Welfare Confer­ence. ra″. “His fundamental conten­tion is that there does not exist up0n the earth any intellectual or scientific authority to which he, Bertrand Russell, or any other man must give credence.”

 

Gorman, Gabriel, cp. Sign 25, no. 6 (Jan. 1946): 54–5. ra″. “[T]he author admits his lack of a specialist’s knowl­edge, except in the case of Leibnitz. While this may be taken as a mark of candor, we can­not avoid the impression … that he appears pretty sure of himself when present­ing his critical examination of the religious, social, and political movements of two and a half millennia.”

 

Gouch, Walter T. The Catholic World 162 (March 1946): 570–1. ra″. “Nor is the full effect of Plato’s thought on future philosophical and political thought, nor the interaction of such thought with historical action demonstrated with the clarity and the force of either Catlin or Sabine in their popular expositions of political philosophy. The naive acceptance of syncretism, the apparent ignorance of modern research into the life and thought of the Middle Ages, the complete reliance on secondary sources of a general nature, the unawareness of the work of Maritain and Gilson mar the author’s attempt to do justice to ‘Catholic’ philos­ophy.” “Finally, there is no mention at all of the growing effectiveness of the Neo-Scholastic revival and the increas­ingly violent reaction to it on the part of the pro­ponents of so-called democratic and scien­tific thought which will yet break forth actively in politics and edu­cation.”

 

Harris, Sydney Justin. “Russell Shows How Western Philosophy Grew from Political and Social Roots”. Chicago Daily News, 31 Oct. 1945. ra′.

 

Hart, C. A. The Catholic History Review 32 (1946): 373–4. ra″. “In the first place it is an extremely ambitious plan that he proposes when it takes in the whole of wes­tern philosophy. As a professional philos­opher Lord Russell is considered to be a distinguished mathematician. Secondly, he has never devoted himself to the difficult field of the history of philosophy. The pres­ent volume shows his evident lack of train­ing in this regard. Finally, his enormous bias, indeed hatred, of everything Christian makes him peculiarly unfitted to write a history of philosophy where Christian view­points have been so influential.”

 

[Hawkins, Denis John Ber­nard.] “A Philosopher’s Crown; the Foundations of Melancholy”. The Times Lit­er­ary Sup­ple­­ment, 7 Dec. 1946, pp. 597–8. ra. “It was not to be expected that Russell should aim at furnishing another conven­tional textbook of the history of thought. The book is an exposition of his philosophy with reference to such history.” “… Russell visits the Christian Church and the Com­munist Party with an approx­imately equal degree of obloquy, the objection being, not that they are unreliable authorities, but that they profess to be authoritative at all.” “[A] total incompre­hension of what the medie­val Church supposed itself to be about.” “Russell’s philosophical position might be summed up by saying that he would like to be a second Locke but is constantly finding himself impelled to be a second Hume.” “His hatred of totali­tarianism prevents him from doing justice to the rest of Plato’s philosophy.…” “Russell’s is a good fighting secularist history.…” “[Political theory] grows steadily in importance and interest as the book ap­proaches our own times.” “His own poli­tical outlook is based upon a pro­found respect for the personality and rights of the human individual. … Does not such a respect logically depend upon a very dif­ferent and metaphysical conception of human nature?” “[W]e are tempted to treat him as the citizens of Plato’s Republic treated the poet, paying him reverence as a sacred, admirable and charming personage, but sending him away to another city.…”

——. Reply: Stanley Cover, “Ideals and Facts”. Times Literary Supplement, 11 Jan. 1947. ra. “One [error by Christ­ian apologists] is a failure to realize that a belief in the dignity of man can be founded upon observation of man, without supernatural sanction. The other is a failure to realize that every ideal must provide its own justification.”

——. Rejoinder: by Hawkins, ibid. ra. “In this way any ideal whatever may be justified, and Russell himself would prob­ably and rightly assign the statement to the modern revolt against reason, whose origin may be associated with Rousseau.”

 

Hook, Sidney. “Bertrand Russell among the Sages”. The Nation 161 (1 Dec. 1945): 586, 588, 590. ra′. “Where Lewes, openly hostile to philosophy, makes the reader feel that it is of exciting concern to every reflective person, Russell, with a greater show of sympathy, fails to establish any good reason for thinking philosophy of the slightest practical importance except in getting rid of a few metaphysical bugbears.” “What stands out in his style is its clarity, which has a deceptive simplicity for the unwary, a sensitiveness to logical form, and a graceful wit, often deflected by flippancy but sometimes sure and deadly.” “Some­times they [other philosophers] are even given the benefit of good arguments they could have used.” “Russell writes history like a mathematician: the complexity, the sense of depth and richness in the history of ideas and events are not communicated.” “The strongest merit of Russell’s history is its emphasis on problems. … [He] offers to solve them.” “It will not influence historical writing on philosophy, nor will it help Russell’s reputation.” “He relies too much on secondary sources and, where not, gives a running commentary on one or two of the philosophers’ works with­out setting forth the philosophy whole.” “Like every other his­torian of philosophy Russell has a philos­ophy of history, too. It is suspiciously like Spengler’s.” “Russell’s moral skepticism, as well as his scientific skepticism, defeats itself in the literal sense that he finds himself incapable of believing what is entailed by his theoretical position.”

 

J., J. H. “Bertrand Russell”. Eastern Daily Press, 20 Nov. 1946. ra.

 

Janzen, Henry. American Political Science Review 40 (1946): 603–5. ra″. “[H]e is less deft in relating ideas to social and political conditions. “In 1943, he an­nounced that in this history every important philosophical system would be ‘treated equally as an effect and as a cause of social conditions.’ ” [From “My Mental Development” (dated July 1943, published by Schilpp in 1944); Papers 11: 17.] “The book gives every indi­cation that Russell considers freedom the highest political good and that he fears the excesses of political power above all. … Apparently there is only one antidote against that ‘madness—the intoxication of power’ that philosophy can legitimately pro­vide. This is to extend ‘the habit of careful veracity’ acquired in the disinterested pursuit of knowledge according to the method of ‘logical analysis’ to the ‘whole sphere of human activity.’ ”

 

Joad, C. E. M. “Bertrand Russell’s ‘His­tory of Western Philosophy’ ”. Proceed­ings of the Aristotelian Society n.s. 47 (1946–47): 85–104. ra″. (Over­laps with much of Joad’s Fort­nightly review.) Russell with Patricia attended this paper on 10 Feb­ruary 1947 and replied to it on stage. See Joad’s A Year More or Less (London: Gollancz, 1948), pp. 92–7, for a self-deprecating account of the event. “Russell’s division of societies into slave–gentlemen societies on the one hand and plutocrat–industrialist societies on the other, each with its appro­priate scale of values. In the former con­templation is valued, in the latter, action.” “Hence, the power-philosophies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries characterised, as Russell points out, by a distinctive attitude to truth and a distinctive attitude to fact. Truth was no longer cor­respondence between ideas and external facts which were other than and inde­pendent of the ideas; truth was what served human purposes and made men happy.” “It is not, I suggest, wholly fanciful to see in the fashionable philosophy of Logical Analysis, to which Russell devotes a final chapter, the distinc­tively modern version of meta­phys­ical escapism … by declaring that there are not and never were such things [as facts].”

——. “A Landmark in Philosophy”. The Fortnightly 161 (Jan. 1947): 1–10. ra″. “It per­forms for philosophy much the same of­fice as Wells’s Outline of History per­formed for history by providing the general reader with a perspective within which he can plot the positions and determine the relations of what have hitherto been isolated little patches of brightly lit thought and event separated by environing areas of dark­ness.” “With the possible exception of A. N. Whitehead, Russell is the only twentieth century English philosopher to wield a comparable influence [on public af­fairs].…” “For philosophy is here presented primarily as a criticism of life offered to those who are concerned to know what great men and women have thought and said memorably about life.”

——. New Statesman and Nation 32 (23 Nov. 1946): 381–2. ra. “The subjectivism of much modern thought is linked with the decline of the authority of the Catholic Church and the rise of Protestantism.…” “[I]t is hard to believe that the immense amount of reading and thinking which the preparation of this work must have entailed could have been devoted to the history of a subject of whose worth-whileness the author was not passionately convinced.” “But what, one wants to know, are ‘the more profound aspects of the moral life,’ or what he terms ‘the sphere of human experience with which religion is concerned’? Is not this to slip in by the back door the values which have been officially extruded through the front?” “The chapter on Aristotle’s logic con­tains a brilliant summary of the criti­cisms which modern philosophers, partly under Russell’s guidance, have brought against the Aristotelian system.…”

 

Kallen, H. M. Lawyers Guild Review 7 (1947): 53–4. ra″. “[H]is sense of log­ical form every so often overrules his feeling for material truth.” “Its style has his usual deceptive simplicity and clearness. It is stud­ded with wisecracks like a pre-war plum-cake with plums. At points it deviates into little essays, wise, beautiful and complete in themselves.” “Each system-maker expresses the hopes and fears of either the Haves or Have-nots of his time and scene.”

——. See also under Edman.

 

Kaufmann, Felix. Philosophy and Phe­no­men­ological Research 7 (Mar. 1947): 461–6. ra″. “I doubt, however, whether the book will promote genuine understanding of the philosophic achievements of the past. … Chiefly responsible for this fact is Russell’s general view of philosophy.” “The first task in dealing with the philosophical doctrines of the past is to refute their claims that they provide absolutely certain knowledge and solutions of problems which cannot be ob­tained by scientific method. After dis­carding these claims the positivist histor­ian of philosophy will uncover the psycho­logical and sociological roots of the doctrines and explain why they have had a strong impact on human thought and action in spite of their errors and shortcomings.” “ ‘This clears up two millennia of muddle-head­ed­ness about “existence” beginning with Plato’s Theaetetus’ (p. 831). These are bold words, but they do not indicate how we are to tell good syntax from bad syntax. Rus­sell’s disciple and penetrating critic Ludwig Wittgenstein was fully aware of the signi­ficance of this problem.”

 

Kraft, Julius. “A Summing-up of Phi­losophy”. Saturday Review of Litera­ture 28, no. 45 (10 Nov. 1945): 16–17. ra′. “There is, for example, no treatment of the influential German development in the twentieth century towards irrationalism (Phenomenology, Philosophy of Existence) and there is no treatment of Whitehead.” “[T]his history of philosophy does not take its place among his impressive works.” “It is obvious that Russell, eminent logician that he is, will not have missed the oppor­tunity of using the history of philosophy as a field of applied logic.” “He derives from a keen analysis of Hume, to whom and to Leibniz he bears close affinity, the con­clusion that empirical knowledge alone is not sufficient for such a science as physics. There is, therefore, only the choice left to abandon either science or empiricism.” “Rus­­­sell passionately rejects unreason in every form, but his History of Western Phi­losophy, forced by his empiristic assump­tion, actually gives its blessings to the de­struction of reason.…”

Larrabee, Clark. “Bertrand Russell’s Outline of Western Philosophy”. Phila­delphia Inquirer, 28 Oct. 1945. ra′.

 

Larrabee, Harold A. “Russell’s History of Philosophy”. The Humanist 5 (1945): 198–9. ra″. “He does not pretend to know all the answers, but he does insist that the questions be made as precise as possible.” “And he shocks the radical with the startling reminder that ‘to some extent, civilization is furthered by social injustice.’ (p. 637) There are other hard sayings in the book, most of them due to Russell’s incorrigible refusal to admit that there can be anything resembling a scientific proof of values. Yet some of his best writing is in criticism of a variety of social and political value-philosophies.”

 

Layton, Irving. Northern Review 1, no. 2 (Feb.–Mar. 1946): 43–6. ra″. “Rus­sell has written a graceful and learned obit­uary for the queen of the sciences.” “It was Marx’s Materialist Conception of His­tory, Russell says, which influenced his views of philosophical development. This is a wel­come admission, very heartening to Marx­ists.” “When Russell identifies Nietz­sche’s Will to Power with lust for power, he betrays an inexcusable ignorance, the ob­tuse­ness of a panicky philistine.” “Russell’s book is not likely to replace the standard histories but it offers a valuable supplement to them. His insistence that the march of philosophy cannot be understood apart from the social and political complex should rev­olutionize the writing of philosophical his­tory.” “Russell rightly praises the Ionian school—materialist, scientific, and atheist —which appealed to objective experiment for the control of man’s environment, and rejects uncompromisingly the Platonic-Chris­­tian tradition with its belief that peo­ple could really solve questions by an appeal to their inner consciousness. … There, perhaps, lies the book’s great­est merit.”

 

Lewis, John. “Bertrand Russell’s 1,000 Page Potboiler”. Daily Worker, London, 21 Nov. 1946. ra. “There is a great deal about philosophy in it, but no phi­losophy—or rather a self-defeating philoso­phy, a fundamental scepticism that dries up the author’s thought and condemns him to sterility.” “This same pacifist is today urg­ing a preventive war against Soviet Russia and charging her, in the House of Lords, with committing atrocities as bad as those of Nazi Germany.” [See Parl. Debates, 5 Dec. 1945, 376.]

 

Lindsay of Birker (Alexander Dunlop Lindsay). Nature 159 (31 May 1947): 723–4. ra″. “It is a curious history because, according to Lord Russell, it has been all wrong. We have now, at long last, discovered that this speculation is vain. The answer to that effect has been finally and conclusively given by logical positivism.” “What is more curious is that Lord Russell does not really connect the history with the philosophy. His account of the philosophers is curiously unhistorical. He examines the work of one of them after another, selects the propositions which they believe to be true and which interest him, compares them with his own views, all as though they were contemporaries and not in the least as though their philosophy was integrated with, or really part and parcel of, the his­torical time in which they were living.” “Leibniz is, perhaps, his favourite philos­opher and he puts him very high. Leibniz had an extraordinarily ingenious specula­tive mind, and, in my judgment, no sense of reality whatever. But he could perform to perfection the kind of ungrounded specu­lative thinking with which Lord Russell identifies philosophy. When Lord Russell comes to Kant he explains that he does not think much of him: of that one cannot com­plain; but the extraordinary thing is that he considers Kant’s most important contri­bution to be his view of space, a view taken by Kant in his pre-critical period; and what Kant regards as his far-reaching dis­covery, that metaphysics should be criti­cism, is not expounded or examined.”

Litvin, J. L. The Gates of Zion, London, 1, no. 4 (July 1947): 43–6. ra″. “While hundreds of pages are dedicated to Greek and Catholic philosophy, only a few pages are dedicated to Jewish philosophy.” “Only Maimonides is mentioned by Russell, who devotes to him exactly 21 lines, while St. Thomas Aquinas, who was deeply indebted to Maimonides’ Guide to the Perplexed, occupies almost 14 pages.” “To suppose that the Nazi doctrines are based upon the Old Testament, whose followers the Nazis have so mercilessly exterminated, is not only complete ignorance, and Bertrand Russell is not an ignorant man, but would seem to denote some deep-rooted antipathy to Jew­ish ideals.” “[O]ne might controvert many other remarks in Russell’s book regarding Jewish philosophers, for instance, his re­mark that Bergson’s philosophy ‘harmon­ized easily with the movement which cul­minated in Vichy’, not mentioning that Bergson himself was a gallant opponent and fearless victim of the Vichyites.”

——. Reply by Bertrand Russell: “A Philosopher Gone Astray”, ibid., 2, no. 4 (July 1948): 32. B&R C48.17. ra″. “[M]y horror of Nazi anti-Semitism was one of the chief causes of my different opinion [on WWII]. Your reviewer never so much as mentions that, in my book, I call Spinoza the most lovable of the great philosophers. He is annoyed because I speak of Jews in modern times as having contributed individually. But no one can say that e.g. Spinoza or Ein­stein wrote as Jews. As for Maimonides, what I say is taken from generally accepted authorities. If there is evidence that it is false, I will gladly correct it.” “It may be true that I have given too little space to Jewish philosophers. If so, this is due entire­ly to my ignorance of Hebrew.…”

——. Rejoinder by Litvin, ibid. ra″. “Regarding Maimonides, if he had only consulted a Jewish Encyclopaedia, which can be found in every important public library in England, he would have known that the statements he makes as facts are demonstrably incorrect.” “Einstein’s ideas, his thought, his struggle for truth, his fate, his whole make-up is completely Jewish. How misguided are Earl Russell’s judg­ments regarding Jews!”

 

Lofthouse, W. F. “Philosophy through the Ages”. Methodist Recorder, 6 Feb. 1947. ra.

M., I. “Bertrand Russell’s New History”. The Age, Melbourne, 1 Feb. 1947, p. 9. ra″.

 

MacRae, Donald. G. “Witty Wise Man”. Forward, Glasgow, 4 Jan. 1947. ra. “It is … probably the only major philosophical work at which one will laugh aloud.”

——. Life and Letters 52 (1947): 224–8. ra″. “It is as though Russell had risen from some dinner in Elysium with those shades most congenial to his questing, sceptical spirit. Gibbon … Voltaire … Hume.…” “Every­where we feel the lacrimae rerum, and the irrational hopes of man condemned to the violence of our century.” “It is a most individual prose, classical, nervous, but un­mis­takable and sustained.”

 

Matthew, Christopher. “Russell Of­fers Glowing Story of Philosophy”. Mil­waukee Journal, 21 Oct. 1945. ra′.

 

Matthews, W. R. “Western Philosophy”. Sunday Times, 24 Nov. 1946. ra. “His lucidity never fails; he has mastered a vast mass of material, and the story moves forward with the verve of a well-told tale.” “Plotinus is treated with remarkable under­standing—can there be, after all, a vein of mysticism in Mr. Russell?” “There is no reference to his [Bergson’s] last important work The Twofold Source of Morals and Religion.” “We may be grateful for this warning against ‘Titanism,’ even though we may wonder how, on Mr. Rus­sell’s principles, he can know either that there is a cosmos or that it is worthy of rev­erence.”

——. “Western Philosophy: Lord Russell’s Brilliant Survey”. The Guardian (Church of England weekly), 102 (31 Jan. 1947): 54. ra. Unsigned but said (in KB’s notes) to be a report of a lec­ture by the Dean of St. Paul’s, i.e. Mat­t­hews; but it does not read like a report. “It is a criticism of the philosophies ex­pounded, and, incidentally in the main, an exposition of the author’s own philo­sophical position.” “It is therefore impos­sible to consider separ­ately the critique of other philosophies and the philosophy held by Lord Russell himself.” “Indeed, the bankruptcy of this ill-founded ‘rationalism’ has no doubt largely contributed, by the vacuum it creates, to the rise of those frank irrationalisms which seek to escape, from a reason sup­posed to be merely destructive, though this is due in fact not to rationalism as such, but to a too restricted view of evidence.…” “Lord Russell’s admirable belief in the value of intellectual truth and noble moral­ity is inconsistent with his narrow empir­icism.” “Throughout one is aware of a most cred­i­table but impossible attempt to raise a structure of idealism, both in regard to truth and love, on the narrow and rotten foun­dation of a sceptical empiricism.” “[W]e hope that his readers will not allow the charm of his manner of exposition to lull their critical faculty to sleep, but will at every point question their own minds as to the truth of the judgements passed. … [W]e are convinced is what the author would have them do.”

——. “The History of Western Philosophy”. (Drawbridge Memorial Lecture, deliv­ered 23 Jan. 1947.) Lon­­­don: Christian Evidence Society, [1947]. Pamphlet. Pp. 16. ra″, ra″ (copied from the John G. Slater collection, Fisher Library, Toronto). “My one ser­ious quarrel … is that he gives a completely misleading impression of contemporary philosophy.” “[R]ead very carefully the long chapter which he gives to David Hume.” “[W]hat­ever else this book is, it is a record of heroic wrestling by human minds, by men like our­selves, with the great problem of human existence.”

 

McMurrin, Sterling M. The Personalist 30 (1949): 179–80. ra″. “The ‘exhi­biting’ of the ‘integration,’ the avowed pur­pose of the volume, is often not accom­plished. It is too much like reading a history of philosophy with an occasional dipping into a history of culture on the side.” “[T]he integration of political philosophy with the social process is good. The treatment of English social institutions deserves mention.…” “[S]ome names appear as chapter headings which receive little if any attention in conventional histories, nota­bly Machia­velli, More, Rousseau, and Byron.” “[N]ot one that rep­resents, except possibly in a few specialized prob­lems, comprehensive and definitive scholar­ship.” “It is the musings of a logical analyst, natur­alist, philosopher of science, and impass­ioned lover of freedom as he observes the great and near great in the past of his culture. The author himself is on every page. This is the main source of weak­­ness of the book as a history of phi­losophy, but is also the occasion of its great value as a philosophic work. Mr. Russell’s opinions on philosophic problems are al­ways worth the attention of any serious student of the subject. His comments here on his prede­cessors and their problems are instruc­tive, illuminating, frequently enter­taining, and sometimes downright fas­cinating. More than that, insofar as Russell represents the leadership of the peculiarly contemporary school of logical analysis, we have here the spectacle of twentieth-century philosophy critically reviewmg its origins.” “Of special value are frequent logical, syn­tactical, and seman­tical analyses, the cri­tique of Aris­totle, the critical exposition of the realistic-nominalistic controversy, the references to modern science and the history of science, and the analyses of mathe­matical philos­ophy.” “By one means or another the author makes his characteristic but not too optimistic pleas for freedom, justice, peace, and private property.”

 

Mercier, Louis J. A. “I. Introduction”. Franciscan Studies 7 (March 1947): 72–8. ra″. “Bertrand Russell is known especially for his attempt to make the methods of the physical sciences those of philosophy.” “According to his reasoning, all philosophers preceding his school fell into confused thinking and sophistical argu­ments, because they allowed their desire for edification to determine their beliefs and this frequently happened according to the political and social circumstances of their times.” “[I]n the tradition of modern nomin­alism… [h]e does not recognize the reality of substances and essences.” “[S]uch subjectivism as that of Russell is inevitable unless you push on to infer logically the existence of a Creator from the existence of the world.” “But if all these possible methods of investigation cannot deal with eth­ical values, why be so sure that there is no other way to establish them save through ‘feelings’.” “[The book] must remain an object of awed wonder.” “[T]he tragic fact … a monu­ment to the disparagement of substance … dissolving of ‘universals’, with the consequent loss of all standards … dissolving of all ‘particulars’.”

——, William Richard Tongue, Rudolf Allers, and James Collins. “A Sym­posium on Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy”. Franciscan Studies 7 (1947): 72–78, 78–89, 193–219, 220–42. ra″. See the entries under the contributors’ names.

 

Merlin, Milton. “Bertrand Russell Of­fers Valuable Philosophy Work”. Los Angeles Times, 11 Nov. 1954, sec. 3, p. 4. ra′.

Morgan, Ray T. “ ‘A History of Phi­losophy’ ”. New York Sun, 19 Oct. 1945. ra′.

 

Müller, Gustav. Sophia 14 (1946): 171–2. ra″. Shortened in Gustav Mueller, Books Abroad 20 (Spring 1946): 208. ra″. “He arbitrarily breaks four pieces (Ideas, Utopia, Immortality, Know­ledge) out of Plato’s organic unity, as one picks glittering pieces out of a rub­bish heap.” “Anselm’s Ontological argu­ment is misquoted in the naive and undialectical form in which it was mis­understood by Gaunilo.” “That all reli­gious thinkers [of the Reformation] (the Mystics, the Reformers, Pascal, Pestalozzi, Schleiermacher, Schelling, Kierkegaard) are ignored is fortunate for them; that all great histories of philosophy (Kuno Fischer, J. E. Erdmann, Windelband, Ueberweg) are ignored is fortunate for the author.”

 

Muratore, Giulio. Science & Society 10 (Spring 1946): 219–23. ra″. “The volume lacks the references and pedagogical apparatus of a working classroom text, even if we waive, accept or discount the personal nature of the treatment.” “[It] neglects al­most entirely fundamental categories of social science, such as law, constitutional forms, productive forces and productive rela­tions, and, in general, economics. An important exception is religion.” “It is emin­ently readable, dotted with anecdote and epigram, with an occasional genteel suggestion of sex or sarcasm, in the platform manner. Then too, Russell has a great gift for analysis and exposition when he knows and likes a subject. He sets forth the problem of universals in Plato or Duns Scotus, the Augustinian theory of time, or the essentials of the Cantorian transfinite, not as museum exhibits, but as things which intelligent men had reasons for saying with respect to impor­tant problems.” “Thus, he leans heav­­­ily on Jakob Burckhardt for the Ren­aissance and Greece, Huizinga for the late Middle Ages and the Reformation, Ros­­tovtzeff for Rome; and on the Cam­bridge Medieval History.” “Rus­sell’s reduction of ethical judgments to subjective feeling is difficult to reconcile with his essen­tially mor­alistic view of men and events. His denial of causality and matter does not seem con­sonant with his regular use of lan­guage implying matter and causation, both phys­ical and historical.” “Russell gives a good deal of space to Locke and Hume and their society, while leaving out the indus­trial revolution, the colonies, and the squire­archy.” “One might allow Russell his fling at romanticism, if it were not that he … regards romanticism as a doctrine straight from hell, and treats extensively, to his vast distaste, of Byron, Rousseau and Nietzsche only because he feels they were influential in establishing the romantic current in the modern Weltanschauung and presaging Hitler.” “His fear of power per se, regard­less of who possesses it, or what use it is put to, serves to paralyze social action and jus­tify the status quo.” “Lord Russell’s latest activ­ities have been to charge in the House of Lords that Russia is committing atrocities as bad, and almost as extensive, as the Nazis ever did; and to speculate in a maga­zine article on the advantages of making war on Russia now rather than later.”

 

Naylor, Douglas. “Author Pleads for More Honest Thinking in Book”. Pitts­burgh Press, 13 Feb. 1946. ra′.

 

Nicolson, Harold. “A Lifetime of Thought in One Brilliant Volume”. Daily Telegraph, 22 Nov. 1946. ra. “Bertrand Russell has so healthy a dislike of subjectivism, sentiment and superstition that his analysis may at moments appear too stringent. It is almost with a shock that one comes upon the phrase: ‘Nietzsche des­pises universal love; I feel it the motive power to all that I desire as regards the world.’ In fact the final impression left by this huge book is not one of discouragement; the reader when he has finished it will feel, not only that he has acquired an immense amount of information, but that he is stim­ulated to a more active energy of thought. As a work of reference it will be carefully preserved; but it is much more than a work of reference; it is an event in the mind.”

 

Paton, H. J. “Western Philosophy”. The Journal of Education 79 (April 1947): 220–1. ra″. “[C]ompared with the customary ponderous histories of philosophy, which can be used only as works of reference, this is a gay, exciting, audacious, witty, and indeed brilliant piece of writing.” “Nevertheless, in spite of its inequalities, its undue simplifications, and its frequent reckless­ness, it remains, not only a brilliant, but almost a great work. The author speaks with special competence in mathe­matical and scientific problems, but he has also intense interest in moral, and especially political, problems.”

——. International Affairs 25 (Oct. 1948): 566–7. ra″. “Those who have a pedantic attachment to historical accur­acy are likely to experience a certain meas­ure of dissatis­faction. It would be unreas­onable to com­plain that a work of this kind does not display the precise knowledge expec­ted from a specialist on a particular author: a gen­eral history must be written largely from secondary authorities. Never­theless, some steps might have been taken to eliminate gross mis-statements of fact.” “Thus we are told that Kant derived his twelve categories from the forms of the syllogism—a fantastic assertion displaying ignorance of the whole framework of Kant’s argument. We are also supplied with novel information about Kant’s ethical views.”

——. “History of Western Philosophy”. [Reply by Patricia Russell in a let­ter to the editor.] International Affairs 25 (Apr. 1949): 247. ra″. “Paton, … it appears, disagrees with many of the opinions expressed in that book. His dis­agree­ment leads him to suggest that my hus­band has not in fact read the works of the philosophers of whom he writes, but only books about them.” “[A] a statement which might be considered libellous.” “[D]ur­­ing the difficult war years when we were separated from our library.…” “[H]ow much energy I often had to spend in persuading American librarians and book­­sellers that ‘Selections’ would not do, and how often I have heard my husband complaining bitterly that his students would read selections.…”

——. [Rejoinder by Paton.] International Affairs 25 (Apr. 1949): 247–8. ra″. “What I did suggest was that in the absence of the precise knowledge which can be expected only from a specialist on a particular author he had fallen into mis-statements of fact which ought to have been corrected. Lord Russell speaks with such authority that I felt obliged to criticize, not his eminence as a philosopher—which is unquestioned — but his reliability as an his­torian.”

 

Pick, F. W. Erasmus 1 (15 Apr. 1947): 452–4. ra. “This is one of the books which can only be reviewed by their author.…” “Russell, in fact, is a historian of no small calibre. His Freedom and Organ­ization, 1814–1914, is still a remark­ably good history of the last century; and it stood the author in good stead when he wrote the last 150 pages of this present History. He is equally happy with the ancient world, and his first 300 pages on the ancient philos­ophers are wholly delight­ful.” “… Russell’s final chapter on the ‘Philosophy of Logical Analysis’ … is the best introduction to this com­plicated matter, and no more rewarding reading could be recommended to any man who has followed Russell thus far.”

 

Popper, Karl. “Broadcast Review of History of Western Philosophy”. Russell 12 (1992): 19–21. Translated from the German by I. Grattan-Guin­ness, ibid., 11–13. ra″. Broadcast on the Austrian Broadcasting Service, 19 Jan. 1947. “What makes the book great is the man who has written it. … What makes him great? I hardly dare say: he was the first philosopher since Kant who ven­tured to alter his opinion, openly and with­out beating further about the bush.”

 

Prescott, Orville. New York Times, 19 Oct. 1945, p. 21. ra′.

Preston, Hayter. “Russell’s All-Time Brains Trust”. Cavalcade, 23 Nov. 1946, pp. 12–13, 17. ra.

 

Randall, John Herman, Jr. New York Times, 21 Oct. 1945, sec. 7, pp. 3, 32. ra′. “This latest book of his will provoke the average intelligent reader to delight, and the average scholar to wrath. The general reader will be right, and the scholar wrong.” “There is shrewd and intel­ligent comment on the general course of Western history.…” “[H]e manages to make hash out of Aristotle’s Meta­physics.” “He treats them all as contem­poraries proposing hypo­theses to be accep­ted, and before he is through he leaves no doubt as to what he rejects and why. There is the charm of the brilliant con­ver­sa­tionalist who always knows his own mind inter­spersed with beautiful pieces of tech­nical philosophical analysis—little gems of exact thinking.” “Indeed, one sus­pects that the key to his attitude toward all pre­vious thinkers is summed up in a remark about Hobbes. After praising Hobbes’ clearness, logicality and com­plete intelli­gi­bility, he adds, ‘He is still worth refuting.’ ” “The philosophic anal­­ysis of which he is a master has cleared up many of their mud­dles, with precision and by objective meth­ods.” “There is irony, there­fore, in the fact that Russell is probably here most shrewd and illuminating in his extensive comments on the great classics of social theory from Plato to Nietzsche, on their ethical and political doctrines as to the best way of living—a matter in which he holds there can be no progress and nothing, strictly speaking, can be known.”

 

Ratner, Joseph. The Journal of Philosophy 44 (16 Jan. 1947): 39–49. ra″. “Unfor­tunately for the execution of his admirable plan, Russell’s life-long interest in the history of philosophy has been very minor.” “With complete indifference to the most elementary demands of intellectual as well as logical consistency Russell winds up with a passionate reaffirmation of his old belief that logic is the essence of philos­ophy.” “Spinoza realized and made expli­cit mention of the fact that ‘there are men lunatic enough to believe that even God himself takes pleasure in harmony’ (I, Appendix), but there is nothing whatever in his doctrines that gives Russell the slightest warrant for including Spinoza among the lunatics.” “It is important to note the slip­shoddiness of Russell’s formulation of The Will to Believe argument.” “It is Bertrand Russell as public mentor and lay preacher on intellectual and moral virtues who dom­inates the History.” “To write edifying passages in praise and defence of intellectual integrity is rather an easy thing to do when one is as fine and practiced a writer as Russell, but the best, as well as the only cure, for ethical disorders and dis­tempers, in the writing as in the living of history, is the control by some sense of legitimacy or law.”

 

Ray, Sibnarayan. “Between Theology and Science”. The Marxian Way 2 (1947): 368–83. ra″. Reprinted in R. M. Pal, ed., Selections from The Marx­ian Way and The Humanist Way; a Magazine Edited by M. N. Roy (New Delhi: Ajanta Publishers, 1999), pp. 368–79. ra″. “[H]e spares the intelligent reader the exasperating experience of being treated to the usual over-simplified popularisation; at the same time, there is nothing of awe or mystification in his treatment of fairly com­plicated ideas.” “The book therefore is an endeavour to study the logic of ideological sequence in its complex social context.” “Nor has he the prophetic single mind­edness of a Spengler or Pareto to trace in history the reputation of any fixed pattern or cycle.” “Russell, in spite of his attempt at fairness, does not seem to have escaped this lure of simplified des­crip­tion.…” “To describe his [Plato’s] method as simply esoteric, therefore, does not appear to me particularly convincing. The same simpli­fication seems to underlie Russell’s ap­praisal of Hegel and Marx.” “Yet an integral study of the process of social development in any of its aspects would necessitate consideration of various other significant expressions of social life—technology and fine arts and various insti­tutions, conventions etc.” “[H]is reference to Greek science is disappointingly small.” “While he is perfectly sound in his exposition of the totalitarian implications of Rousseau’s primitivism, he does not give sufficient emphasis on the democratic ra­tion­al bearings of Kant’s philosophy.” “In spite of its failure to fulfil its ambitious promise, the book is a masterly piece of pioneer work in the construction of a social history of philosophical thought; it is also a work of art and a fine expression of the new democratic spirit.…”

 

Riddell, Alex. “Alex Riddell’s Books Review”. Northern Whig & Belfast Post, 22 Nov. 1946, p. 4. ra″.

 

Ritchie, A. D. “A Defence of Aristotle’s Logic”. Mind n.s. 55 (July 1946): 256–62. ra″. “[A]ny important and valid criti­cism of Aristotle should demolish [W. E.] Johnson equally.” “If Lord Russell knows about other forms of deductive infer­ence, why does he not do for them what Aristotle did for the syllogism—set out the valid and invalid forms? Or is it a secret too deadly to reveal, like the use of atomic energy?” “The most serious charge brought against Aris­totle is that he confuses exis­tential and non-existential propositions by treating ‘Socrates is mortal’ as of the same form as ‘All men are mortal’.” “A linguistic disease requires a linguistic cure, and this Lord Russell has provided [in the theory of types].” “Lord Russell may have done something of the kind in an esoteric work, Principia Mathe­matica; that arith­metic may be, as he says, purely linguistic, and that this kind of logic may be the generic form of which arithmetic is a speci­alised development.”

——. “All Thinking Men”. The Observer, 24 Nov. 1946, p. 4. ra. “It is eminently readable; in fact very difficult to put down.” “If he dislikes the man he states correctly and clearly some two-thirds or a third of his philosophy and ignores the rest.” “Throughout, the treatment of moral and political theory is poor and patchy; there should be far more or else none at all.” “It comes as a shock to find Lord Russell treat­ing himself as badly as Berkeley.”

 

Roberts, Leo. Isis 38 (Feb. 1948): 268–70. ra″. “[P]erhaps the worst [book] that Mr Russell has written. For Mr Russell is no historian. And this surely is a disquali­fication in one who undertakes to write his­tory. He is deficient in the very elements of the craft; above all he lacks detachment, self-discipline and patience.” “The atmo­sphere of the book is one of unremitting assess­ment, alleviated by brief periods of armed neutrality, together with occasional lapses into downright approval.” “Mr Rus­sell’s reliance upon second-hand sources is almost total and for another his unflagging attachment to the present is fatal to any free indulgence in a sense of the past.” “In a fit of excessive caution, Mr Russell remarks that ‘some think that Maimonides influenced Spinoza, but this is very questionable.’ It would be hard to think of anything less ques­tionable. Mr Russell says of Goethe, as if speaking of himself, that he admired Spinoza without beginning to understand him.” “[T]here are doctrines in Locke which adumbrate a socialistic outlook.” “[A] pity he did not allow himself more room for an exposition of contemporary doc­trines of semantics and mathe­matical logic.”

 

Roberts, Mary-Carter. “Bertrand Rus­sell Traces Trends of Philosophy.” Sunday Star, Washington, 28 Oct. 1945, p. C–3. ra″.

Rogers, John William. “Bertrand Rus­sell Writes Brilliantly and Independ­ently in His New History of Western Phi­losophy Just Published”. Dallas Times Herald, 28 Oct. 1945. ra′. [Rogers says he once interviewed him—he was in Dallas in 1929.]

 

Ryan, Columba, op. “Minute Philosopher”. Blackfriars 28 (1947): 362–6. ra″. “Not the for­midable Russell, Russell the brilliant logi­cian, but Russell the iconoclast, I had almost said the septua­genarian adolescent, Russell the minute phi­losopher.” “It is a sorry tale of human imbecility. And all, it seems, because the logic and analytic meth­od of Lord Russell had not yet been vouchsafed to mankind.” “[T]here are pas­sages, as one would expect from him, of acute criticism. He brings up his most beautiful instruments of logic to operate upon the bodies laid before him.” “This list [of errors] could no doubt be pro­longed indefinitely by a trained historian [of phi­losophy]; enough has been said to make one hesitate to trust the guide at any point where he may have an axe to grind.…” “I am afraid they [readers in public libraries] will believe every word he has written.”

 

Sabine, George H. The American His­torical Review 51 (Apr. 1946): 485–6. ra″. “Indeed the aim of the book is so remote from his dominant interest in the subject and his interest is so little compatible with sympathetic historical understanding that one wonders why he should have been willing to undergo the vast labor of pro­ducing a book so comprehensive.” “It is tempt­ing to regard the book as itself an integral part of the society in which it was produced and to guess that the author’s interest is com­pounded of two parts perhaps inhar­mon­iously blended. Beside Russell’s intel­lectual interest in the abstract problems of a logical and cosmic philosophy there is a deep dis­tress occasioned by human suffering and some strong convictions about the best way of living. And though no speculative justi­fication of the latter appears to him to be forthcoming, there is a deep-seated feel­ing that intelligence ought to be able to say some­thing significant about them.”

 

Samuel, Viscount (Herbert Samuel). “A Defence of Reason”. The Spectator, 22 Nov. 1946, pp. 542–3. ra. “I feel un­qual­ified gratitude for the sustained defence of reason that marks Russell’s commentary. More than to any other one thing, the troubles of the modern world are due, I feel convinced, to the exaltation of intuition, emotion, what Pascal called ‘the heart,’ over the intellect. From Rousseau and his school sprang Robes­­pierre, the Terror, the generation of turmoil and confusion in Europe that ended in the reaction under the Holy Alliance. The romantic intuitionalism of Fichte and of Nietzsche was the root of the poison-plant of which Hitler was the perfect flower. Marxism is sheer emotion, dressed up with logic and pretending to be scientific; it can­not withstand critical anal­ysis, either as an economic system or as a philosophy of life; and it is at this moment one of the main obstacles to the return to ordered progress, to the restoration of peace and tranquillity, which the peoples of the world so passion­ately desire.” “This book of Bertrand Rus­sell’s may prove a powerful factor in bring­ing to an end that ‘revolt from reason’ which has caused such immeasurable harm to this first half of the twentieth century.” “Yet one feels in this book, after so many negations, the lack of a positive.”

 

Sloanaker, Hiram L. “A Fine Monu­ment to Long Research”. Boston Post, 25 Nov. 1945. ra′.

 

Smythies, Yorick. The Changing World, no. 1 (Summer 1947): 72–81. ra″. “[HWP] embodies what seem to me the worst features of Lord Russell’s previous more journalistic works, but it is of poorer quality than any of these.…” “Lord Russell is in a position above the ‘great men’ with whom he ·deals, and passes upon each one summary judgment of his character and intellectual integrity: the impression being given that Lord Russell sees through him and even beyond him.” “This humour con­sists, essentially, in portraying the man or philosophy under consideration as some­thing semi-absurd.” “But if a student read Lord Russell’s book in order to learn about philosophy—as he might read a book on mechanics in order to learn about mech­anics—and if he then tried to explain in his own words what a philosophical ‘theory’ is, or what any particular philosophical ‘theory’ is, he would find difficulties which prevented him from doing this.…” “[T]he most incomprehensible philosophy outlined in the book is what Lord Russell calls ‘modern analytic empi­ricism’ or ‘logical empir­icism’. … But they have no more jus­tification for speaking of general agreement than any other group of philosophers.” “I fear that Lord Russell’s book will teach successfully a popular substitute for think­ing and for knowledge, and that it will both appeal to and stimulate slipshod thinking.”

 

Somerville, John. “An Open Letter to Bertrand Russell”. Philosophy of Science 13 (Jan. 1946): 67–71. ra″. “I take the liberty of addressing you in regard to one specific aspect … the treatment of issues connected with the Soviet Union and the relation of its philosophy, dialectical materi­alism, to science and scientific method.” [Russell’s Jewish-Marxian dic­tion­ary.] “[T]he astonishing assertion that Marx ‘always despised the Slavs.’” “Would it not have been quite within the scope of this project to examine the relation between the ethical values mentioned and the present system of laws and institutions in the U.S.S.R.?” “Yet it is infinitely better than the treatment of the conventional history of philosophy, that is, no treatment at all.” “I am grateful, as I believe we all are, for the magnificent way in which you are able to transcend academic pomposity, and the quiet scorn with which you refuse to dodge the fighting issues.”

 

Sullivan, Daniel J. Commonweal 43 (4 Jan. 1946): 313–14. ra″. “The section of Greek Philosophy is little more than a smooth-flowing re-hash of secondary sources—Cornford, Burnet and Benn in particular. With Dean Inge as the auth­ority for Plotinus.” “The exposition of Aris­totle is erroneous.… It could hardly be otherwise when a completely nominalistic interpretation is given to his metaphysical doctrine.” “[After Locke,] his treatment of modern phi­losophy … is fresh, lucid, and sprinkled with suggestive and illuminating insights. … [H]is treatment of the German philoso­phers is excellent and … [when] correlating the phi­losopher to his time pays its best dividends.”

 

Taggart, Joseph. “It Was a Sin to Eat Beans …”. The Star, London, 19 Nov. 1946. ra.

Taylor, Harold A. See under Edman.

 

Temple, George, frs. “Bertrand Russell on St. Thomas Aquinas”. The Tablet 188 (30 Nov. 1946): 292–3. ra. Reprinted in Advocate, Melbourne, 29 Jan. 1947, p. 10. ra″. “Argu­ments drawn from mathe­matics are there­fore strictly speaking irrele­vant to the theo­logical issue which St. Thomas has under discussion.” “There is so much objectivity in Earl Russell’s account of St. Thomas Aquinas, and such an evi­dent desire to be fair and just, that it is much to be regretted that his view of St. Thomas’ works was not broad enough to include his purely philo­sophical writings, and that his discussion of the special prob­lems referred to above was not suf­ficiently profound to reach the true depth and power of St. Thomas’ thought.”

 

Thurber, John M. “History of Western Philosophy Written for the Average Read­er”. Buffalo Evening News, 27 Oct. 1945. ra′.

 

Tongue, William Richard. “ii. Book i. Ancient Philosophy”. Franciscan Studies 7 (March 1947): 78–89. ra″. “As far as I am aware, Russell has never written extensively on other philosophers with the exception of Leibniz and Bergson.” “He recognizes in the search for something per­manent one of the deepest philosophic instincts, and adds that it is derived no doubt from love of home and a desire for a refuge from danger. The possible existence of a really permanent and objective truth is not discussed or even conceived.” “So many inter­esting and pro­voc­ative state­ments which are made in the general chapters become so many threads left hanging….” “Better are the sum­maries at the end of chapters carrying the history of ideas and concepts forward into modern times. It is here that Russell makes his greatest con­tribution. It is a critique of the various systems con­sidered in the light of his own logical analysis, monism, or semantic dis­cipline. It is probably here that we should seek the clue to the interest which Russell had in undertaking such a work.” “Many of his summaries are excellent—I should single out those on Plo­tinus and on the mathematics of Pythagoras.” “[The] demolition of ancient philos­ophy is accomplished by the applica­tion of his logical atomism or logical analysis.” “[S]pecific references are scanty, with the exception of Aristotle. Here generous refer­ences to the Bekker pag­ination are inter­spersed throughout …, a procedure which should have been universally fol­lowed.” “The style is that of an extremely logical, well-or­ganized and disci­plined mind, …  notice­able in the complicated sections on logic and ma­the­matics….” “[L]in­guistic study is extremely important in the study of philosophy, and especially of its history, and put to this use the semantic discipline might easily bear fruit.…”

 

Vance, John G. “Bertrand Russell’s Caprice”. The Nineteenth Century and After 141 (Jan. 1947): 41–52. ra″. “… Mr. Russell might have said, in simple truth, that he was ill-equipped for this gigantic task.” “[Does he wish to suggest that he, in this particular vision of ‘philosophy [that of Logical Analysis],’ in any way ‘crystallises the thoughts and feelings which, in a vague and diffused form, are common’ to our community?” “He is interested primarily in cosmology.” “[H]e lacks, both by nature and temperament, that serene detachment which the historian of philos­ophy must both cultivate and express. He also lacks the gift of exposition as indeed do so many English writers.” “Moreover, Hei­degger’s philos­ophy and particularly his Sein und Zeit has been taken over and adopted, some­times word for word, by the French Exis­tentialists who are sweeping all before them, by brochure, treatise and novel, in liberated France. Even if Mr. Russell felt unable to cope with the French Existen­tialists, he ought never to have omitted the work of Brentano, Husserl and Heidegger, nor of the whole Phenom­eno­logical School.” “About Boe­thius, St. Augustine, and later about the School­men, Mr. Russell mostly gives us secondhand—0r to be honest are they even secondhand?—lame and impov­erished accounts.” “While including much that is strictly irrelevant, he leaves out the extraordinary political devel­op­ments of the Dark and early Middle Ages.” “Probably mathematicians have done more to misun­derstand philosophy in its nature, prin­ciples, and scope, than any other of the many groups who have ad­dressed them­selves to the pursuit of wis­dom.” “[He] has gone out of his way for many years to give us a vision of conduct which is strangely like the Russian com­munist tenets of some twenty years ago.”

 

Waterhouse, E. S. London Quarterly Review 172 (1947): 176. ra″. “[T]here are no footnotes referring to orig­inal sources, and no bibliography, though there is a good index.”

 

Weiss, Paul. “The History of Mr. Russell”, New Republic 113 (3 Dec. 1945): 760, 762. ra″. “The book is the work of an urbane, civilized, intelligent, sen­sitive man, what one might expect from a disciplined eighteenth-century wit, from a Greek sophist with a knowledge of modern formal logic.” “Russell also relies too much and without sufficient acknowledgment on secondary and tertiary sources such as the Britannica, the Cambridge History, Gib­bon and Ueberweg.” “[S]ome­­­times child­ishly iconoclastic and unre­li­able. But it does deal with fundamental issues.”

 

Weldon, T. D. “Philosophy and History; Lord Russell’s Survey”. The Manchester Guard­ian, 30 Nov. 1946, p. 6. ra″. Reprinted Man­chester Guardian Week­ly, 13 Dec. 1946, p. 333. ra. “Many be­ginners find it extremely puzzling that they should be expected to open their attack by a more or less meticulous inquiry into the views of Plato or Descartes rather than those of Bergson or Bertrand Russell.” “[P]hi­­losophy includes its own history in a sense in which science does not.” “Russell, for instance, is convinced that any serious philosophy involves a way of life as well as a logical system. He does not conceal his conviction that a scientific approach to prac­­tical problems is generally beneficial, and that the influence of organised religion is usually deleterious.”

 

Whiteley, C. H. “Western Philosophy”. Birmingham Post, 10 Dec. 1946. ra.

 

Williams, Bernard. “Limpidity and Impu­dence”. The Spectator 206 (19 May 1961): 725–6. ra″. “… Russell’s concern for the empirical method is matched by his contempt for ped­antry; and this contempt has the effect that he sometimes seems more attached to the idea of factual evidence than to the labor­ious processes of gathering it.… It is a cur­ious fact about Russell that he often feels compelled to approach subjects histori­cally.…”

 

Wisdom, John. “Bertrand Russell and Modern Philosophy”. Politics and Letters 1, no. 1 (Summer 1947): 75–82. ra″. Reprinted in his Philosophy and Psycho-Analysis (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1953), pp. 195–209. He calls the short final chapter on Logical Analysis “a pity” and “ventures a few remarks [11 pages] intended to supplement” it.