R eviews

A NEW COMPANION TO RUSSELL STUDIES

Aaron Preston

Philosophy / Valparaiso U.

Valparaiso, in 46383–6493, usa

aaron.preston@valpo.edu

Russell Wahl, ed. The Bloomsbury Companion to Bertrand Russell. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Pp. xviii, 428. us$190.00 (hb). isbn: 9-78-1-4742-7805-8.

his Companion is a most welcome guide, both to the thought of Bertrand Russell himself, and also to the evolving fields of Russell scholarship and the history of analytic philosophy, at the points where the two intersect. The book is comprised of fourteen essays covering not only the main areas of Russell’s thought, but also some important historical and socio-disciplinary dimensions of Russell’s intellectual life. It also includes a helpful timeline of key events in Russell’s life, and a comprehensive and up-to-date bibliography of works by and about Russell. Every last essay is top-notch. Every last essay is top-notch, and adds something new and interesting to our understanding of Russell’s thought. I can’t hope to do justice to any of them, let alone all of them, in this review. While I will try to say something informative about each one, limits both of space and of my own interests and competencies mean that I will end up saying more about some than others.

The volume is divided into two parts, which I will discuss in turn. Part 1, “Russell in Context”, consists in five essays discussing Russell’s connections with British idealism ( James Levine), Pragmatism (Cheryl Misak), Frege and Meinong (Bernard Linsky), Wittgenstein (Russell Wahl), and the Vienna Circle (François Schmitz).

Levine’s chapter provides a detailed discussion of the ways in which Russell’s engagement with British idealism influenced his philosophical development, beginning with his foray into idealism itself, moving on to Moorean realism, and finally into his post-Peano period. Of special interest to me was Levine’s discussion of the specific form of the ontological argument that famously converted Russell to Hegelianism. Why anyone would accept the soundness of any given form of the ontological argument is often a matter of great puzzlement, even for theists. Whether one finds such an argument compelling usually turns upon the ontological assumptions one brings to it, rather than the logic of the argument itself. So it was with Russell, who accepted it on the basis of a Bradleian view of the ontology of judgment. But this is just a single point in a very rich chapter exploring how idealism exerted an ongoing influence on Russell’s thinking in many different areas, including the nature of simples, propositions, relations, meaning, understanding, knowledge, time, magnitude, number and the nature of philosophy itself.

Misak’s chapter successfully complicates the standard view that Russell “was resolutely antagonistic to pragmatism” (p. 59). She demonstrates that his objections to pragmatism were directed mainly at the versions endorsed by Schiller, Dewey and above all William James, but that Russell thought very highly of C. S. Pierce, and had leanings of his own that could be construed as “pragmatist” in nature. In fact, Ramsey claimed to embrace a pragmatism derived from Russell himself. What he meant, Misak explains, was that Russell endorsed “the pragmatist idea that a belief is a habit or disposition to behave, and can be evaluated as such” (p. 63). One wonders, though, whether this ought to be described as a “pragmatist idea,” given that it originated with Alexander Bain, who is usually thought of as a “British Empiricist”, and that, as Misak discusses, it can be taken in a more extreme, behaviourist direction or a more moderate, pragmatist direction. That matter aside, Misak proceeds to discuss Russell’s visit to Harvard in 1914. There his familiarity with Piercean pragmatism deepened through interactions with faculty and students, especially Josiah Royce, who was then recasting his personalistic idealism in light of Pierce’s theory of meaning. Misak shows that Russell’s time at Harvard gave him “a new, positive thought about what is good in pragmatism” (p. 68). This helped him to solve problems concerning the nature of perception and of mind in general, and influenced his thought in The Analysis of Mind in numerous and often unobserved ways.

Bernard Linsky’s chapter concerns the relation of Russell’s thought to that of Frege and Meinong, which turns out to be far more complex and interesting than familiar potted histories of analytic philosophy would suggest. Linsky’s piece is a master-class on the value of understanding canonical texts like “On Denoting” in the context of an author’s relevant non-canonical writings, including correspondence, personal notes and marginalia. Using such sources, Linsky carefully reproduces Russell’s progress toward discovering the paradox that bears his name, and toward his famous example of “the present King of France” in “On Denoting”. I found the latter discussion especially rewarding, as it shows that Russell’s objection to Meinong’s theory of non-existent objects was but a small blip against a background of shared interest and broad agreement on a range of relevant and important issues. This is the sort of thing that adds weight to Peter Simons’ contention that “the Analytic-Continental Rift”^{^[1]} was a strange accident of history. It reinforces the sort of puzzlement Dummett felt over the divergence of the two traditions which, like the Rhine and the Danube, rise and, for a time, run together.^{^[2]} It’s a reminder that, into the late 1920s, Russell could describe himself as belonging to a philosophical camp, not of logical atomists or analytic philosophers, but of scientifically oriented “realists” including James, Frege, Husserl, Meinong, Moore, Couturat, and the American New Realists.^{^[3]} A study like Linsky’s shows that a different approach to research and pedagogy, if adopted from the beginning of the analytic tradition, might have made some kind of difference in the relations between the two traditions.

The value of looking to lesser-known texts is again on display in Russell Wahl’s chapter, which explores Russell’s engagement with Wittgenstein between the years 1911 and 1914. This is well-worn ground, so it’s remarkable that Wahl is able to add something new to the picture. Looking to the edits Russell made between two drafts of his 1912 paper “On Matter,” and interpreting them in light of correspondence with Lady Ottoline Morrell, Wahl argues that Russell was initially led by Wittgenstein in the direction of a phenomenalistic solipsism that Russell called “scepticism” about matter, but that he quickly began backing away from this position. The power of Wittgenstein’s sceptical challenges were so great, however, that it forced Russell to give up working on the nature of matter and to turn his attention to logic and epistemology, specifically to the question of “what can be logically inferred from sense-data” (p. 105). Here we enter the better-known part of the story, from Wittgenstein’s attacks on Russell’s multiple-relation theory of judgment to his dragging the reluctant Russell to accept that that logical truths are mere tautologies. Although this is more familiar terrain, Wahl’s account adds considerable nuance and detail, giving a fine-grained account of the likely progression of Russell’s thought in response to what he once described as “Wittgenstein’s onslaught”.

Part 1 of the Companion closes with François Schmitz’ careful tracing of the main lines of interaction between Russell and the members of the Vienna Circle. He shows that, despite seeing Russell as a leading representative of “the scientific world conception”, few of these positivists beyond Carnap were influenced by him deeply and directly. He also discusses Russell’s criticisms of positivism in An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth.

This brings us to Part 2, consisting of nine essays on “Philosophical Issues”: logicism (Kevin Klement), denoting and language (Graham Stevens), logic as the essence of philosophy (Gregory Landini), perception and sense-data (Russell Wahl), introspection and self-knowledge (Donovan Wishon), epistemic justification (Dustin Olson and Nicholas Griffin), neutral monism (Christopher Pincock), moral philosophy (Ray Perkins, Jr.), and Russell’s approach to history (Peter Stone).

The failure of logicism is often presented as an early chapter in the history of analytic philosophy. But Kevin Klement invites us to reconsider this negative assessment of the logicist project. By working carefully through alternative interpretations of key concepts in and around the system of Principia Mathematica, he argues that Russell may have been more successful than he himself realized.

Graham Stevens makes the intriguing proposal that (i) Russell’s theory of descriptions is first and foremost “a theory of natural language semantics”, that (ii) it “was always intended to be a part of a wider project in the philosophy of language” which “places the analysis of propositional content at the very heart of philosophy”, and hence that (iii) the philosophy of language was “the foundation for Russell’s philosophical project as a whole” (p. 179). Stevens offers a lucid and in many ways powerful argument for these claims. And, like so many others in this collection, he makes good use of lesser known works to properly contextualize more familiar Russellian ideas. My only quibble with Stevens’ argument is that, given Russell’s early views on the metaphysics of propositions themselves, it’s not clear that “philosophy of language” is the best category in which to place views about how to parse propositional content. One can agree with Stevens that “the theory of descriptions … should not be viewed through a lens distorted by its applications” in metaphysics or epistemology (p. 201), but still worry that its initial categorization as “a theory of natural language semantics” is itself the result of viewing it through a particular lens which, if not distorted, is at least a bit too narrow. Consider Russell’s claim in The Principles of Mathematics (1903) that because “a proposition ... does not itself contain words …[but rather] the entities indicated by words, … meaning, in the sense in which words have meaning, is irrelevant to logic” (p. 47). This would seem to place propositions beyond the domain of language as normally understood. He does go on to say that “such denoting concepts as a man have meaning in another sense: they are, so to speak, symbolic in their own logical nature ...” (ibid.). But it’s far from clear that this other kind of meaning is best described as “linguistic”, as belonging to the field of “natural language semantics”, or to the “the philosophy of language”, rather than some branch of the philosophy of mind or of ontology (on the model of Meinong or Husserl, say). Arguably, the theory of descriptions belongs to the intersection of these two forms of meaning, only one of which is uncontroversially described as “linguistic,” and operates simultaneously in two domains, only one of which is uncontroversially described as “the philosophy of language”.

Next, Gregory Landini unpacks Russell’s claim, in Our Knowledge of the External World (1914), that logic is the essence of philosophy. According to Landini, this claim is central to Russell’s notion of a “scientific” philosophy, and it requires two things (p. 211). First, it requires a logic “involving the impredicative comprehension of attributes”, what he calls “comprehension principle logic” or “cp-logic” (p. 206). Second, it requires that our knowledge of cp-logic be “privileged”, in the sense that it remain “independent of the civil wars between metaphysicians fighting over favorite kinds of necessity governing their special abstract particulars”, such as numbers sets, classes, propositions, etc. (p. 208). According to Landini, the cp-logic of Principia Mathematica met these requirements because it didn’t propose any favoured type of abstract particular. Instead, in Principia and in Russell’s other published works between 1910 and 1916 (what Landini calls “the Principia era”), Russell’s consistent view was that logical knowledge is secured by direct acquaintance with universals (p. 206). However, in the manuscript of Theory of Knowledge, which Russell would leave unfinished, he crossed the line and proposed that specific types of abstract particulars were involved in logical knowledge, like logical forms. This cost Russell’s cp-logic its privileged status. Further damage was done as Russell entered his neutral-monist phase and became more sympathetic with Watsonian behaviourism. Both tended toward the undermining of the subject-object relation, without which there could be no knowledge by acquaintance. In line with other recent work from people like Alexander Klein,^{^[4]} Landini emphasizes the relationship between Russell’s logic-oriented metaphilosophy and his moral and political concerns. Specifically, Landini sees a connection between the metaphysical neutrality required for cp-logic’s privileged status and Russell’s commitment to liberating people from oppressive dogmas, as expressed in texts like “A Free Man’s Worship”. Thus, as Landini sees it, much more than the nature of philosophy hangs in the balance here.

Taking up a thread from his earlier chapter, Russell Wahl discusses Russell’s variations on the theme of sense-data theory, arguing that there is much more continuity in this progression than is often recognized. Whereas others were attracted to sense-data theory in connection with problems of perceptual error or a desire for epistemic certainty (sense-data being that about which it is impossible to be mistaken), Wahl shows that Russell was attracted to it because of his interest in the epistemology of physics, which provides the unifying thread. Russell is distinguished from other sense-data theorists not only in his motivations, but also in the content of his views. Whereas many sense-data theorists took sense-data to be mind dependent and to “have the properties that perceptually appear to us”, Russell did not. Wahl moves carefully through the thicket of what he sees as mistaken interpretations of Russell on these points in order to set the record straight.

Stepping out of chapter order at this point so that I may more easily draw some thematic connections, I turn to Dustin Olson and Nicholas Griffin’s contribution, which serves up a fascinating discussion of Russell’s general views on epistemic justification. Taking inspiration from a metaphor in Human Knowledge (1948), they present Russell as endorsing what is sometimes called a “foundherentist” position. “The edifice of knowledge”, Russell says, “may be compared to a bridge resting on many piers, each of which not only supports the roadway but helps the other piers to stand firm owing to interconnecting girders” (HK, p. 413). The piers are supposed to represent items of direct knowledge, while the girders represent theoretical constructs which unite them into a coherent whole, and lend them epistemic support through a kind of abductive justification. This yields “a theory of justification in which the whole is more credible than any one part” (p. 289). The authors call this “epistemic holism” (p. 296). The practical application of holism to the pursuit of knowledge, they note, looks remarkably like the method of “reflective equilibrium” associated with Nelson Goodman and John Rawls (p. 300 ff. ). Making a move which by this point is common among the essays in this volume, Olson and Griffin argue that there is much greater continuity in Russell’s thought on this point than is usually recognized. Here, historical scholarship again proves its importance for philosophy. Russell’s 1907 paper, “The Regressive Method in Discovering the Premises of Mathematics”, contains clear indications of “epistemic holism”, but it was not published until 1974. It has often been supposed that Russell was a foundationalist. But reading Russell’s later work in light of his 1907 paper, it becomes clear that his epistemic views were more subtle from early on, and “how we interpret Russell’s philosophical programs later on is significantly impacted” (p. 302). Indeed, now that it’s been so clearly pointed out, I can’t help but see “Russell’s bridge” almost everywhere I turn in his writings.

Donovan Wishon carefully reconstructs Russell’s developing views on introspection and self-knowledge between 1911 and 1918, and one that enables us to see his “epistemic holism” at work. The early Russell saw introspection as epistemically on a par with sense perception. Thus, on analogy with Russell’s account of the structure of sensory knowledge, Wishon proposes that Russell accepted a threefold distinction among the sources of direct introspective knowledge: direct awareness of psychological acts, direct awareness of psychological complexes, and judgments about psychological complexes. All of these count as non-inferential forms of knowledge—so “knowledge by acquaintance”—even though the latter two categories are derived (non-inferentially) from the first. But this can be supplemented with inferential “knowledge by description”—a fact that turns out to be very important as Russell’s thought progresses. Wishon does a masterful job of leading us through Russell’s initial (1911) reasons for believing that we have this kind of direct knowledge of, or are acquainted with, the continuing, conscious self, and then for slowly backing away from this position. Over the remainder of that decade, Russell moved from the position that we do have direct, introspective self-knowledge, to the position that we only probably do, to the view that we probably don’t, and that we only know ourselves “by description roughly as ‘the subject of such-and-such introspected psychological episodes’ ” (pp. 269–70). He also slides from thinking that the self of which we may (or may not) have knowledge is an enduring self, to thinking that it may be only a momentary self, new with each episode of self-perception. Throughout, we see Russell’s “epistemic holism” at work, as his changing views about self-knowledge are mainly a function of his shifting assessments of what counts as the best explanation for the data of introspection, rather than changing views on the nature of those data themselves. Toward the end of this decade, Russell began treating the self as a logical construct, which makes it look as if he had eliminated the self entirely. However, Wishon argues that this is just a methodological technique for simplifying the body of knowledge we have about the self, and is not to be taken as an eliminative, metaphysical move. Wishon’s chapter closes with some brief remarks on Russell’s move to neutral monism and its implications for self-knowledge.

Discussion of these themes is taken up again in Christopher Pincock’s chapter on neutral monism. Pincock provides a detailed and highly nuanced reconstruction of Russell’s journey—beginning as early as 1913 and continuing through 1925—from a rejection of neutral monism to a qualified and finally a confident endorsement of it. His account complicates the received view that Russell was a full-fledged neutral monist by 1921 (in The Analysis of Mind ). Pincock argues that Russell’s progression toward this view was slow, and that The Analysis of Mind sees him stopping just short of a full-blown neutral monism because of his failure to locate mental images in physical space. Pincock identifies three main roadblocks to Russell’s full acceptance of neutral monism: sensation, belief, and that feature of consciousness which suggests “an internal structure that involves a center and increasingly peripheral bands of objects” (p. 319), what Russell called “the problem of emphatic particulars”. As Russell came to see how each of these could be explained from a neutral-monist standpoint, he came to what Pincock calls a “qualified” endorsement of the view. (Here we again see Russell’s “epistemic holism” at work, reflected in the varying degrees of confidence he ascribes to neutral monism as the best explanation for the directly known data of consciousness.) The final step into a “confident” endorsement of neutral monism came only in 1925, when, influenced by the general theory of relativity, he came to see particulars as events in space-time. This enabled Russell to identify mental images with brain events, thereby removing his last remaining roadblock to full confidence in the theory.

In the penultimate chapter, Ray Perkins supports Charles Pigden’s contention that Russell was more of an ethical theorist than is usually recognized. The misconception arises from the fact that most of his ethical work belongs to his popular writings and to some of his lesser-known papers. Perkins walks us carefully through the evolution of Russell’s ethical thought, beginning with an early period under the influence of G. E. Moore before moving to a position dubbed “proto-emotivism” by Charles Pigden. Russell himself called it “the subjectivity of values”. Except for a brief experiment with what we now call “error theory” in the early 1920s, this remained Russell’s basic position for the rest of his life. He did alter some of the details of his position over the years, including the development of a full-blown and precisely articulated form of emotivism, often judged by the few who have studied it to be superior to the better-known versions of Ayer and Stevenson. Perkins provides a lucid and detailed discussion of all these developments. I especially benefited from his discussion of Russell’s brief turn to error theory, and his own debate with Pigden over its merits and over Russell’s reasons for abandoning it. Perkins explains that Russell’s formal reasons for adopting subjectivism, having to do with the limits of rational argumentation in the moral domain, were not decisive, and that Russell knew this perfectly well. However, he thought that “belief in the objectivity of value was a cause of international conflict” (p. 340), and this weighed heavily in Russell’s mind as he came to “reflective equilibrium” in favor of subjectivism. Likewise, Perkins and Pigden agree that one likely factor in Russell’s quick about-face on error theory was “Russell’s 1920 witness to the amoralistic leaders of the Russian Revolution and its brutal aftermath—an aftermath of the sort he may have thought error theory would promote” (p. 341). This seems plausible to me as well; but if this was Russell’s reason, I don’t see why he would have been any happier with emotivism. How exactly is an absence of moral truth that results from moral claims being neither true nor false superior, as a bulwark against the brutal cruelty of a Lenin or a Stalin, to an absence of moral truth that results from their all being false? As Perkins explains, Russell tried to impart a measure of “quasi objectivity” (p. 342) to his mature emotivism by defining “good” in terms of desire satisfaction, and by treating the harmonization of desire as, if not a necessary condition of, at least something highly conducive to, maximal desire-satisfaction, both for individuals and groups. Whether any of this succeeds in imparting the needed objectivity is a matter of debate. Even after modifying his view in these ways, Russell was still dissatisfied with emotivism’s weakness when it came to condemning evil behaviour, admitting in 1960 that “I cannot see how to refute the arguments for the subjectivity of ethical values, but I find myself

incapable of believing that all that is wrong with wanton cruelty is that I dislike it.”^{^[5]}

The chapter concludes with a discussion of Russell’s work as a public intellectual, advocating for what he seems to believe are “the correct” moral positions on a number of social and political issues, and condemning “the wrong” ones. This has always seemed to me something of a performative contradiction: how can one who does not believe in objective moral truths advocate publicly for positions as if they were objective moral truths? Perkins confirms the answer I first learned from Michael Potter:^{^[6]} Russell understood himself to be advocating not for truths, but for his own preferences; moral discourse is simply a form of emotional persuasion, and the fact that it may appear otherwise is the fault of our ordinary moral language. So there’s no inconsistency here. Still, those of us who are moral realists may wonder whether this stance isn’t morally problematic: after all, it is precisely this feature of emotivism that led Alasdair MacIntyre to charge it with turning moral discourse into a form of manipulation.^{^[7]} And when one considers that “Russell’s moral concepts are essentially social-political notions” (p. 342) and the likely contribution emotivism made to bringing about our “post-truth” culture with all its present global, political consequences,^{^[8]} one wonders if it would survive the kind of consequentialist evaluation that Russell prescribes for determining obligation. It may be that Russell ought not to have adopted these views! One final point is worth making. As we seek to reclaim Russell’s full significance for ethics, noting not only his heretofore unrecognized contributions to ethical theory, but also the connections between his ethical views and other areas of his thought, such as logic, one area we should not neglect is his theory of the self and of self-knowledge, as discussed by Wishon and Pincock. The main line in ethical thought from Plato through T. H. Green puts knowledge of the self, its parts, and their proper organization, at the heart of ethics. The fact that, by the late nineteen-teens, the continuing, conscious self disappears in Russell (and other early analysts), at least as an item of knowledge, is surely of great consequence for ethical theory.^{^[9]}

Finally, Peter Stone considers Russell’s approach to historiography. Stone sets Russell’s thought in the context of an early twentieth-century debate between proponents of a “scientific” approach to history who assigned it the task of discovering strict causal laws of historical development, and proponents of a “literary” approach who assigned it the task of creating morally educative narratives intended to shape public opinion and character. Stone argues that, whereas Russell endorsed the scientific method in philosophy, he went the other direction in history. In conversation with his historian friend George Trevelyan, Russell developed his own nuanced position on the proper form and purpose of history, which fell more on the “literary” than the “scientific” side of this debate, while retaining some elements of each. Russell rejected the “scientific” ambition of deriving strict causal laws from the patterns of known historical events, but he insisted that history must be grounded in fact, that the stories it produces must be true. Trevelyan did not deny this, but seems to have been less committed to truth than Russell was. Stone cites a passage from Russell’s journal in which he describes Trevelyan’s early view as “virtually that history should consist of political pamphlets” (p. 368), i.e., propaganda. This was not Russell’s view, and in fact he seems to have been a salutary influence on Trevelyan in getting him to take truth more seriously. But for Stone this raises the question of why truth should matter to “literary” historians. If the ultimate point of history is to tell stories which “breed enthusiasm” (p. 366) by “inculcating certain attitudes in a mass readership” (p. 372), why does it matter if those stories are true? Why won’t propaganda or mythology do just as well? One might think the obvious answer is that an aspiration to truth is built into the very nature of historical work, part of the concept of “history”. To me, this seems to be the point of Russell’s assertion that commitment to truth is to history-writing as “the rules of the sonnet” (p. 377) are to sonnet-writing—they belong to the form of the practice. Stone is unimpressed with this analogy because, as he notes, rules of poetic-form are largely arbitrary, whereas commitment to truth “is essential to the function of historical writing” (p. 377). But in my eyes this objection misses its mark. Neither sonnet-writing nor history-writing is a natural kind. They are human practices guided by conventional norms. But truth-seeking has been a norm of history-writing ever since Herodotus chose to call his business “inquiry” or “research” (ἱστορίης) rather than “storytelling”. This is precisely why we make distinctions between history and myth or propaganda—commitment to truth is built into the former, but not the latter. Historian and geographer David Lowenthal makes this point in distinguishing between history and what he calls “heritage”, distorted portraits of the past, constructed with minimal regard for historical truth, for purposes of shaping a people’s sense of shared identity in the present. Nothing prevents genuine history from sharing heritage’s aim of fostering a shared sense of identity, or “literary” history’s highly similar aim of “inculcating certain attitudes in a mass readership” for ethico-political purposes, so long as it retains a commitment to truth. In fact, Lowenthal finds it impossible to identify a non-arbitrary boundary between history and heritage in terms of their actual incorporation of truth. The only strict difference between the two is aspirational: “meticulous objectivity is history’s distinctive noble aim”.^{^[10]} This is exactly the point that Russell makes in his “sonnet-writing” analogy: “History, however much it may be pursued as an art, has to be controlled by the attempt to be true to fact” (quoted on p. 377).^{^[11]} So, I’m inclined to see Stone’s worries over connecting history to truth as a bit overblown. It is, of course, disturbing to see Trevelyan and sometimes Russell seeming to approve shoddy historical narratives simply because they fit with their aesthetic preferences (Stone walks us though several such cases), but I’m not convinced this is attributable to a failure to establish a secure conceptual link between “history” and “truth”, as opposed to psychological or characterological foibles in the neighbourhood of “confirmation bias”, or perhaps an incursion of the licence for preference-driven advocacy that Russell’s emotivism afforded him in the moral domain—a domain with which literary history’s unique type of ethico-political advocacy overlaps.

These relatively minor disagreements do not detract from my overall appreciation of Stone’s essay. I take his principal thesis, that Russell’s approach to history is to be located in the context of this methodological debate between the “scientific” and “literary” schools, to be spot-on and highly illuminating. And he provides rich and interesting discussions of both Russell’s reasons for rejecting the “scientific” approach, and his attempt to carve out a sensible middle ground between it and less stringently fact-oriented versions of the “literary” view. There is much to be gained from Stone’s essay, and from all the essays contained in this excellent volume.

works cited

[1] Peter Simons, “Whose Fault? The Origins and Evitability of the Analytic–Continental Rift” (2001).

[2] Michael Dummett, Origins of Analytical Philosophy (1993), p. 26.

[3] Russell, “Philosophy in the Twentieth Century” (1924).

[4] See his “The Politics of Logic” (2020).

[5] Russell, “Notes on Philosophy, January 1960”.

[6] Michael Potter, Bertrand Russell’s Ethics (2006).

[7] Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (1981).

[8] See Aaron Preston, “Ayer’s Book of Errors and the Crises of Contemporary Western Culture” (forthcoming).

[9] See Dallas Willard et al., The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge (2018), Ch. 1, and Preston, “Personhood in Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century Anglophone Philosophy” (2019).

[10] Lowenthal, Possessed by the Past, p. 106.

[11] See the discussion of Rosenthal in connection with Rorty and the historiographical genre of geistesgeschichte in Preston, “Philosophy and Its Past: a Eudaimonistic Perspective” (forthcoming).