E ditor’s Notes

 

 

Contributors adam trybus teaches philosophy at the University of Zielona Gora, Poland. Russell’s work on the foundations of geometry is a focal point of his research on “Philosophical and Formal Analysis of Spatial Logic”, building on his doctoral studies at Manchester. He is interested in rejection in contemporary logic and logical formalisms in programming languages. alan bishop taught English literature (and latterly gerontology) for 35 years at McMaster. Among various works by Vera Brittain edited by him is Chronicles of Youth. He has also edited Reliquary: Poetry of the First World War by Henry Smalley Sarson, and, as Peter Abbot, has published four novels. nicholas griffin, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, former Director of the Russell Research Centre and Past General Editor of the Collected Papers, retired in 2019. He is McMaster Library’s Scholar in Residence in the Russell Archives. bernard linsky, frsc, is emeritus from the Philosophy department at the University of Alberta. He is coediting (with James Levine) Bertrand Russell’s Lectures on Logic and Theory of Know­ledge, 1910–1914—the notes taken by Sheffer, Moore, Costello, Lenzen and Eliot, and (with Lianghua Zhou) a “back translation” of Russell’s lectures and addresses given in China, and is introducing a Routledge reprint of The Problem of China. andrew g. bone is Senior Research Associate at the Russell Centre, where he has worked since 1997. He has edited or coedited four CPBR volumes. He was part of the editorial group that produced the digital edition of Russell’s Brixton Prison Letters for the Collected Letters of Bertrand Russell. giovanni duarte de carvalho is an independent scholar residing in Brazil. He hopes to work next on the interactions of Russell, Marxism and Soviet Russia. bridget whittle is Digital Archives Librarian at McMaster Library. your editor continues to manage bracers, revise the Russell Bibliography, edit Collected Papers 24 and 25, and help push along the Collected Letters.

 

50th Anniversaries  On February 2, 2020 it will be 50 years since the death of Bertrand Russell and the publication of The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism. It’s a good point at which to recall the mission of his later years. There remain not a few people who worked with, interviewed, or otherwise knew him at 90+. It’s because in Russell’s later years he worked with young people. February’s Spokesman will have articles on him.

 

Principia Proofs Visit the account of the McMaster Library event (with Philosophy and Mathematics and Statistics) by Bernard Linsky on October 4: brighterworld.mcmaster.ca/articles/one-of-a-kind-corrected-proofs-shed-new-light-on-a-philosophical-masterpiece/. The volumes were donated in memory of his parents, Joan and Leonard Linsky.

Russell Research Centre The new Director, Alexander Klein, is the author of “Russell on Acquaintance with Spatial Properties: the Significance of James” (2017). He plans a book on Russell and James. (James was, to Russell, the “most personally impressive” of eminent philosophers, excluding those still alive when he wrote this in the late 1940s.) Klein’s long-term research project is to adapt a computational technique called “topic modelling” for studying Russell’s vast output.

 

Forthcoming Books Volume 26 of Russell’s non-technical papers of 1950–52 is, at the time of writing, about to be delivered to the publisher, Routledge; the editor is Andrew G. Bone. Ruth Derham’s Bertrand’s Brother: the Marriages, Morals and Misdemeanours of Frank, 2nd Earl Russell (Stroud, Glos.: Amberley Publishing) and Larry D. Harwood’s, Mad about Belief: Religion in the Life and Thought of Bertrand Russell (Wipf and Stock) are forthcoming, as is a McMaster Library website devoted to an expanded Homes of Bertrand Russell by Sheila Turcon.

 

russell.mcmaster.ca There was a need for a master compilation, or meta-site, for Bertrand Russell at McMaster. Russell Studies aren’t confined to a single department of the university. Thus I have provided russell.mcmaster.ca. There are further, less major pages at the links on the master site.

 

New Books Francisco Rodríguez Consuegra, Relational Ontology and Analytic Philosophy: Bertrand Russell and Bradley’s Ghost (independently published at Amazon, 2019). Philosophical Consolations of Bertrand Russell, quotations compiled by the prolific compiler Akṣapāda (paperback and Kindle, Amazon, 2019).

 

Open Access to e-Russell ¶Except for the latest four issues (38,1 to 39,2) Russell is on open access at mulpress.mcmaster.ca/russelljournal/.

 

Recent Acquisitions Marilyn Aronberg Lavin has donated six letters that Russell wrote her late husband and renowned historian of art, Irving Lavin (1927–2019). There’s also a testimonial for a Fulbright scholarship. The letters were written in the late 1940s, when Lavin wished to study at Cambridge. He did study under Russell, for whom he once wrote a paper on Shelley. He left philosophy because of his lack of mathematical talent and his poverty. His thinking methodology remained constant, Margaret Lavin says, and he sometimes quoted Russell.

 

bracers.mcmaster.ca The Russell Archives’ annotated catalogue of letters to­talled 132,310 records by 20 January 2020, with many “Rotblat letters” to go. Russell Archives 4 has a pre-bracers finding aid—see russell.mcmaster.ca. When ra4 is entered, there will be thousands more records for this superb trove of his last years.