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Satisfaction, as everyone knows, is measured in the units of time one gets to spend talking about or listening to pet ideas. This year’s crop of BRS talks (combined with sessions of HEAPS) was especially satisfying. Moving backwards, the afternoon session heard first from Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen on “Significs and Early Analytic Philosophy”. Significs is the branch of linguistics mothered by Lady Welby. Prof. Pietarinen revealed in the course of his talk the existence of correspondence between Lady Welby and Russell, and this exciting tidbit led me to read these instructive letters during a later visit to the Archives. In my opinion, they reveal Russell’s skill in giving the brush-off, though he later seems to have changed his assessment of the value of Welby’s work, and it is perhaps mostly through Russell’s intellectual honesty in attributing certain ideas to Welby that most of us know of her work at all. In “Russell, Wittgenstein, and Logical Atomism” Prof. Paul Los argued against the view that atomism arose under Wittgenstein’s influence, giving evidence of an earlier date and a different provenance for that theory by referring us, in part, to Russell’s baldly explicit realism in his 1911 French paper “Analytic Realism”. Fellow Russellian James Connelly spoke on “Wittgenstein On Proper Names and Logical Truth” arguing for the presence in the Tractatus of an interesting and important theory of proper names. In taking this line James perhaps places himself in the overdue backlash to the current fashion of denying that Wittgenstein ever had any theories, meant to express theories - or heck! - even knew what a theory was. In the morning session, Prof. David Martens gave an exquisitely crafted argument in a paper called “McTaggart On the Conditions for Knowledge”. I have since come to realize exactly how rare McTaggart scholars are, so this was a unique treat. Prof. Stefanie Rocknak of Hartnack College in New York spoke on “Russell’s Impact on Quine”. Her paper (and those of the other speakers) was well received by a healthy audience of about 12 souls.
Aaron Preston’s paper “Current Work on the History and Nature of Analytic Philosophy” created sufficient flap and high feeling that it was necessary for the group to continue the conversation afterward in the calming presence of food and drink. His talk describes analytic philosophy as a will o’ the wisp, a façon de parler with no common feature or language game uniting its supposed representatives. What is interesting about Aaron’s treatment of the topic - for me anyway – is what it reveals about his conceptions of philosophy in general. Not everyone will agree with me that philosophy is essentially meta-philosophy; this is a matter of taste. And so, too, is the Central APA. —Rosalind Carey
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