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The Cambridge Companion to Bertrand Russell (Cambridge Companions to Philosophy)

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There are at least four Bertrand Russells: The English aristocrat whose values were forged during the Edwardian revolt against Victorianism, the mathematical logician, the Nobel Prize winning popular author and the radical activist. The authors of this collection have obviously decided to focus on Russell the mathematical logician of the period between 1900-1920, with a little attention to some of his later work in metaphysics, epistemology and philosophy of science. Undoubtedly, this reflects Russell's true legacy to philosophy and his ongoing influence in that discipline. Unfortunately, most people know Russell from his popular writings, which, though they often deal with topics discussed by philosophers (such as God and morality) are hardly distinguished by the sort of rigor or seriousness that a genuinely philosophical discussion of these questions deserve. Most of his essays on these topics date badly and are of no more than sociological interest today; the views he expresses, however radical they may have been at the time, have become (even if true - and that is certainly debateable) either banal through repetition or long since bypassed in the course of philosophical discussion. They may still be read with pleasure by some but not to much profit by anyone who has kept abreast of philosophical developments in these areas. Russell's genius in mathematics and logic (like Einstein's in physics) was not reflected in most of the other areas to which he turned his active mind, such as religion, politics and educational theory despite the fact that his authority was often accepted in these areas as well. As such, his popular influence is well out of proportion to his actual contribution to the philosophical discussion of these questions. His writings on these topics can be and are increasingly being ignored by serious philosophers, a fact mirrored by the composition of this collection. Nevertheless, since the questions to which Russell's work is still relevant are abstract, complex and of interest largely to specialists, this emphasis means that a collection of this sort is only going to have limited accessibility to and interest for the reader whose main entree to Russell is something like The ABC of Relativity, Marriage and Morals or Why I am not a Christian.

This volume is, in my view, an excellent introduction to its subject, namely Bertrand Russell. The introduction by Nicholas Griffin is superb, and indeed has suggested to me new avenues for the investigation of Russell's thought (such as the controversy between realists and anti-realists regarding the Law of the Excluded Middle, or his definition of Scepticism in AMa as a boundary problem), it then goes on, to examine the place of Mathematics in Russell's thought and Russell's contributions to Mathematics, it then sketches the young Russell's views regarding Idealism and his rejection of Kant and Hegel as well as his short-lived partnership with G.E. Moore, it then goes on to give an account of his Logicism (the view which takes mathematics to be in some sense reducible to logic) of his Theory of Types for solving the paradox which bears his name and his Theory of Definite Descriptions in an excellent paper by Peter Hylton which shows ways to evade Kripke's criticisms of the russellian analysis of proper names in terms of definite descriptions. Michael Beaney, editor of The Frege Reader, also contributes with an splendid 70 page paper on the philosophies of Frege and Russell. There is a complicated paper in the jargon of mathematical logic dealing with one of Russell's attempts, a sophisticated one, to deal with the paradoxes in set theory, namely the Substitutional Theory, but it is mostly here, and a bit in the paper on Types where mathematical logic features more proficiently. Most of the papers in the book are quite intelligible without much knowledge of logic. The second part of the book deals mostly with Russell's Metaphysics and his Theory of Knowledge, kudos to Grayling and Demopoulos on two astonishing papers, by the former on Russell's desire to explain the relation of individual phenomenal experience to science and by the latter on an account of Russell's view of physics as something which gives structural knowledge of the world by applying to the interpretation of said science the relation-arithmetic which he worked out in Principia Mathematica. As is well known Russell gave an account of the structure of the world around 1918 which purported to explain the sort of facts, qualities and relations that should exist on account of logic, a paper by Bernard Linsky deals with this. The volume ends brilliantly with a well-thought out and philosophically exciting paper by Charles Pigden in which he sketches out for criticism some of Russell's views regarding world government (in the way making some enlightening comparisons with Thomas Hobbes), and suggests that Russell's ethical philosophy is much more original and important than what is generally thought, for he invented Error theory and Emotivism.


Anyone who knows of Russell's place in philosophy will not be surprised to see that more or less half of this book deals with topics in logic and the philosophy of mathematics. The birth of so-called Analytic Philosophy can be traced down to the philosophico-mathematical investigations of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, and Russell's place in philosophy as one of the greatest philosophers of the XX century is firmly grounded in his philosophical work during the first twenty years of the twentieth century where such books as Principia Mathematica and The Principles of Mathematics occupy a prominent place. Indeed, a great deal of analytic philosophy is concerned with language and philosophical logic where topics such as reference (which greatly occupied Russell's thought) hold an important place. It was Russell who said that his greatest accomplishment was his theory of definite descriptions, this theory, as Russell understood it, was valuable not only for its logical or linguistic applications but mainly for its applications in areas such as Epistemology, the Philosophy of Mathematics and Metaphysics. Whomever has read some of Russell's later works, for instance Human Knowledge, won't be surprised by the extent in which in that book he investigates what sort of thing is a Proper Name. Indeed throughout his philosophy Russell held that one could be misled by the grammar of natural language in assuming certain features of the world which logic showed to be in principle disposable. For instance one may assume that the sentences "Greeks are Men" and "Socrates is a Man" attribute a predicate to a subject and thus think that the world must contain only properties and particulars whereas in fact "Greeks are Men" is logically extremely different from "Socrates is a Man", the first says that if anything is a greek that is a man, the second that something unique Socrates has the property of being a man. These sort of things are puzzling and extremely important and relevant to debates about Existence, the Structure of the World, the sort of things the World contains, the sort of thing that is mathematics, the relation of language to fact, and of mental acts (belief, desire, etc) to language and to facts. Indeed much muddleheadedness in philosophy, as Russell tried in his life to make us see, is a consequence of neglecting the logic of our language. The puzzle about "The Present King of France is bald" is extremely relevant to all this, for how are such sentences significant when there is no such thing as a Present King of France ? To what are we attributing such a property ? How can we say anything about non-existent things ? If there is a non-existent King of France are there other non-existents and if so, what sort of existential status do they have since they do not exist ? All of these are tremendously important philosophical enigmas which Russell's theory of descriptions answers swiftly. It is important to realize that Russell's most striking and original contributions are in the abstract fields of logic, philosophical logic and the philosophy of mathematics; indeed though he wrote an enormous amount of books on religion and politics, most of them, though superbly written and provocative, where written for the purpose of rational persuasion rather than philosophical investigation, indeed much of what Russell says on religion has been said by others, like Voltaire for instance, and his disposal of the arguments for the existence of God is of course not novel, as is well known Kant smashed all philosophico-theological arguments for the existence of God in his Critique in the eighteenth century; it is therefore no surprise that a volume which deals with Russell as a philosopher focuses, like this one, where it does; since it is those abstract problems in mathematics, language, the philosophy of physics, epistemology, scientific inference and metaphysics which Russell saw as the proper domain of philosophy and where his mark is still most felt. Regrettably this book does not mention the Russellian solution to the mind-body problem which has featured prominently in contemporary works in the philosophy of Mind such as Chalmers (1996) and Lockwood (1989); an article about the philosophies of Russell and Wittgenstein would have been welcome too. This book is not for everyone, but undergraduate students of philosophy, specialists and people interested in the most abstract features of Russell's thought will benefit greatly from studying this elegant, sharp and thought-provoking volume.

Very helpful. Deals with Russell's work in modern philosophy (and, so, his earlier writings), rather than his activities as a political activist.

I have never felt compelled to review any book before. I have read 14 of the Cambridge Companions, some of them have been spotty but this one should be thrown out and the second edition let out to a new editor.

The biographical introduction explains Russell's long varied and interesting career. It then spends the first half of the book on articles on his logic. Most of these articles are not written in English but in an academic jargon of symbolic logic, pages and pages of it. (If you buy the book read chapter 3 and skip the rest.) The book then goes on to be a little more interesting concerning his epistomology and metaphysics.

The final chapter concerns whether he was a moral philospher and I believe justifies that he was.

But the book barely notes what his moral philosphy was, anything about his political philosophy and nothing about his comments on religion. Russell spent a large part of his life expressing couragious and unpopular ideas. This volume totally ignores this aspect of his works and concentrates on how one might legitimately say "The current King of France is bald" (hint- there is no current King of France)While this is an interesting logical question, it is not worth 300 pages.