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The past two issues of the BRS Quarterly have focused on ideas – what did Frege think of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, what are we to think of Russell’s and Quine’s views about a general term that subsumes wildly different kinds of things, did Russell have a modal logic, etc. In this issue, the focus shifts to personalities, with Justin Leiber exploring the very different intellectual styles of Russell and Wittgenstein. Justin takes exception to Ray Monk’s characterizations of these two outsized individuals in Monk’s Russell and Wittgenstein biographies, and argues for his own, different view of their personalities.[1] By way of providing evidence for his case, Justin relates a few stories about his own philosophical education which give us some insight into how analytic philosophy was practiced and understood in its heyday. Moving back to philosophical issues, Jane Duran provides an illuminating comparison of Russell’s arguments against both neo-Hegelian idealism and pragmatism. She demonstrates that Russell viewed the two schools as sharing the same underlying assumptions and weaknesses, and so subjected them to the same criticisms. We continue our series of letters by Russell – this one is a 1942 letter to the editor of Time Magazine on Gandhi’s demand at that time for immediate Indian independence. Ray Perkins has written an introduction to the letter that sheds further light onto Russell’s thinking on the issue. Also concerning India, Phil Ebersole reviews a biography of the Indian intellectual and adventurer M.N. Roy, while Chad Trainer reviews Peter Denton’s recent examination of Russell’s views on science, religion, and war. Both reviews are highly informative. This issue’s conference report is by Gregory Landini, who covered the recent History of Early Analytic Philosophy Conference at Purdue University for us. The conference seems to have been packed with exciting work, and those of us who missed it hope that these papers will appear in print sometime soon. Arthur Sullivan writes about logic and language in his reply to Kevin Klement’s review of Arthur’s recent anthology of writings by Frege and Russell. In ‘Society News’, Tony Simpson of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation has sent an account of a recent “citizen’s” tribunal in Brussels modeled on Russell’s Vietnam Tribunal and Phil Ebersole of the GRRS reports on the recent resolution of Dr. Tunis Shaikh’s persecution in Pakistan for blasphemy. Finally, Gerry Wildenberg, also of the GRRS, provides us with yet another Rustlings! crypto-cipher, and in addition, offers some advice on how to solve them. Note: Of the three puzzles Gerry writes for Rustlings! each month, the third is a kind recently devised by Gerry, who has not yet had an opportunity to try solving one himself. He wonders how “solvable” people find them. Has anyone solved one of these sorts of puzzles yet? Send us an email and let us know. February’s Russell letter to the editor was reprinted with the permission of the Bertrand Russell Archive of McMaster University. [1] Monk’s Russell biography is the two volume The Spirit of Solitude: 1872-1921 (1996) and The Ghost of Madness: 1921-1970 (2000); his Wittgenstein biography is the 1990 The Duty of Genius. |