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At This Year's Annual Meeting of the Bertrand Russell Society, held June 18-20 in Plymouth, New Hampshire, there were several strong talks by scholars new to the Russell community. Those who missed the annual meeting will be pleased to know that some of these talks will be published in this and future issues of the Quarterly. Iva Apostolova, a graduate student from the University of Ottawa, one of these new Russell scholars, spoke on some problems that drove Russell’s shift ‘From Acquaintance to Neutral Monism’. That talk appears in this issue of the Quarterly. In her essay, Iva argues that Russell’s problems in accounting for the cognitive faculties of sensation, memory, and imagination within his theory of acquaintance were important factors in his adoption of neutral monism. Look for more of these talks from the most recent BRS annual meeting in future issues of the BRS Quarterly. McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario is the home of the Bertrand Russell Archives and Bertrand Russell Research Centre. Based on his talk from the 28th annual meeting of the Society (May 25-27, 2001, at McMaster University), Nicholas Griffin, in his essay ‘How the Russell Papers Came to McMaster’, tells the story of how McMaster University acquired Russell’s papers and became the world center for Bertrand Russell studies. As will be seen, it was first of all Russell’s involvement in Cold War political struggles that led to the papers going to McMaster. since the end of the Cold War, a growing number of studies have appeared describing Cold War politics in greater detail than has previously been available, telling the story with more complexity than was admitted at the time. This has been particularly true in recent discussions of the role of intellectuals in the Cold War and the effects of the Cold War on them and their disciplines. This discussion begins with Ellen Schrecker’s 1986 No Ivory Tower, which documents the influence of McCarthyism on American academics, particularly on the dismissal of many academics from their teaching positions, and the general political quiescence on campuses during that period. Following in Schrecker’s footsteps is John McCumber’s 2001 Time in the Ditch, which considers the effects of McCarthyism on the discipline of philosophy in the 1940s and 1950s. McCumber argues that not only were philosophers dismissed and politically silenced then, but that the philosophy of the period itself became depoliticized and bereft of values and of the possibility of taking a moral stand, and that this accounts for the dominance of analytic philosophy in the 1950s and 1960s, though he admits that the continental philosophy of that period had similar problems. A more detailed and complex view of the effects of the Cold War on logical positivists and logical positivism, as well as a more sympathetic one which argues that analytic philosophy was more the victim than the villain of the story, is George Reisch’s forthcoming book (in 2005, from Cambridge University Press) How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science: To the Icy Slopes of Logic. Other recent works have documented the role that intellectuals themselves played in the Cold War and the role that governments and government funding played in the lives of these intellectuals. Leading this list is Frances Stonor Saunder’s 2000 The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, but there have recently been many others of the same sort. The question for this journal, of course, is what Russell’s role in all of this was, and especially what is new and of interest about Russell that we can learn from all of these new materials. The BRS Quarterly hopes to review much of this literature in coming issues, in an attempt to work out some of the details of Russell’s place in the emerging picture. As an introduction to this subject, Jack Clontz has written a review for this issue of the Quarterly of recent charges by Timothy Garton Ash about Russell’s cooperation with British government propaganda agencies during the Cold War. In particular, Garton Ash has charged that the publication of three books by Russell was not only financed by the British Foreign Office, but that Russell knew of this at the time. Jack considers the details surrounding these allegations and enlarges on the story. Also in this issue, Thom Weidlich reviews a new play, Boise, by David Folwell, which is centered around the sayings of Bertrand Russell, and interviews the author. Tony Simpson, of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, sends us a report from the Boston Social Forum and the plans discussed there to coordinate peace efforts in the U.S. with other such efforts around the world. Ray Perkins has selected another letter to the editor by Russell, this time, one written to the Times arguing for the right to stage an anti-nuclear rally in Trafalgar Square. When the authorities denied permission for the rally, it was held anyway, and with the help of a forceful police response, a melee occurred. Meeting minutes by Chad Trainer from the Board of Directors and General Membership meetings held during the BRS June Annual Meeting, and a Treasurer’s Report by BRS Treasurer Dennis round out this issue of the BRSQ. |