A Chronicler Looks at Russell
MORGENBESSER, SIDNEY
A Chronicler Looks at Russell Bertrand Russell: The Passionate Skeptic. By Alan Wood. Simon & Schuster. 249 pp. $3.50. Reviewed by Sidney Morgenbesser Department of philosophy, Columbia...
...Both were fiercely devoted to science and democracy, opposed Stalinism when it was unpopular to do so, were involved in educational experiments, and are now philosophically in eclipse...
...It may very well be that the coming philosophical decade will be marked by attempts to establish conclusions distinctive to Dewey's thought with the rigor, skill and clarity characteristic of Russell's...
...It transmits the author's unexceptionable admiration for Russell's industry, integrity and preternatural intelligence, and it contains enough illustrations of the famed Russell wit for us to be amused as well as amazed...
...He simply casts aspersions on the abilities and occasionally on the sanity of Russell's critics...
...Reviewed by Sidney Morgenbesser Department of philosophy, Columbia University Alan Wood's biography of Bertrand Russell has two important virtues...
...As a result, we have a record of Russell's undisputed genius and moral greatness, and still await a perceptive study of his place in the fantastic community of fantastic thinkers that was intellectual England in the first half of this century...
...Indeed, it is amazing to note the similarities and instructive to study the differences between Dewey and Russell...
...Notice that critiques of Russell are primarily directed against his episte-mology...
...Wood gives the impression that Russell's wide range of interests and fearless defense of human freedom are unmatched by any 20th-century philosopher...
...Wood has the zeal of the chronicler, and lacks the curiosity and concern of the good biographer or philosopher...
...Even in his own backyard Russell has not remained a hero...
...This thesis is an interesting one, but has the unfortunate consequence of not enabling us to distinguish Russell's philosophy from that of most pre-pragmatic and many post-pragmatic ones...
...It was not only, or even primarily, his quest for certain premises, but his specification of the relationships between entities described in such premises, and entities described in more dubitable ones, that unifies Russell's thought...
...his early writings on ethics contain no substantial advance over Moore, and his later ones recapitulate Hume...
...In a letter to Charles Sanders Peirce, William James called Russell an ass for attempting to deal with the problem of knowledge without emphasizing the fact that every knower was surrounded by a concrete universe...
...In this the author overlooks the obvious case of Dewey...
...But in all fairness to our author, it must be admitted that he attempts to answer more fully those who agree with Cohen, and insists that Russell's search for premises which are certain, and upon which we can base our everyday knowledge, unifies his philosophy...
...Unfortunately, the work is a balanced one, and each virtue has its corresponding vice...
...For though Russell has written with wit and ingenuity on practically all problems of philosophy, it is toward our comprehension of the nature of formal and empirical knowledge, and of the languages in which such knowledge is expressed, that Russell has contributed most...
...His writings on religion vacillate between oversimplified sociological analyses of the role of church and castigations of the universe for not having been created...
...Essentially the same point was made, albeit more diplomatically, by John Dewey and George Santayana...
...It has become de rigeur in Cambridge to consider Russell a perpetuator of paradoxes, a philosopher misguided by his own misuse of ordinary language...
...Dewey was saner and more path-clearing than Russell, but was frequently woolier and had none of Russell's talent for technical logical analysis...
...Wood has a simple and unsafe method of dealing with the criticism and the issues they engender...
...Morris Raphael Cohen called attention to the frequent changes in Russell's position, suggesting that the mere multiplicity of doctrines diminished the worth of each of them...
...And indeed this is as it ought to be...
...It has become fashionable to consider Russell's early work on the foundations of mathematics and logic as beyond praise, and his later work on the foundations of knowledge as beyond acceptance...
Vol. 41 • September 1958 • No. 31
