|
the 32nd annual meeting of the bertrand russell society convened May 13-15 at mcmaster university, as it has in 2001, 1990, 1983, 1981, and 1978. This year’s meeting, hosted by Kenneth Blackwell and Nicholas Griffin, overlapped with the conference ‘Russell v Meinong: 100 Years after On Denoting’, which was organized by Griffin and Dale Jacquette to celebrate the centenary of Russell’s landmark essay ‘On Denoting’. The two conferences attracted an interesting mix of Russellians and Meinongians, 63 people in all. As always, the talks were excellent, the company enjoyable, and the conversation stimulating. McMaster University, home of the bertrand russell archives and bertrand russell research centre, and epicenter of Bertrand Russell studies, takes up a substantial portion of real estate on the southwest corner of Hamilton. Located in the vicinity of Niagara Falls, Hamilton is easy to reach from Toronto by driving alongside shimmering Lake Ontario on the QEW. But within Hamilton, streets become willful, seemingly intent on turning you back downtown, away from McMaster. Once arrived, however, there is always much to do—parking, dithering, checking in and registering, meeting others, and, especially, nosing about the Russell Archives. Later, a crowd of Russellians enjoyed a buffet of lasagna and listened to a recording of the July 9 1955 Russell-Einstein Peace Manifesto press conference. Ken Blackwell, Andy Bone and David Blitz also engaged in a panel discussion, The Russell/Einstein Peace Manifesto: 50th Anniversary Reflections. Both the BRS AM and the OD conferences turned out to be located in the vast basement of a complex of buildings near the library and student center. In some ways the venue was ideal, with large and small classrooms, a big room for gathering between talks for snacks and coffee. But the rooms might as well have been in a maze, a fact adding much to the disorientation and mass confusion of latecomers arriving minutes before curtain call. Meanwhile, the appearance of new blood—the Meinongians!—added a frisson of excitement. What strange, pale breed was this, come to share space with us Russellians? What would the day hold? If titles of talks are any indication of intellectual sensibilities, compared to the Meinongians, who fixed their minds’ eyes chastely on the and a, Russellians are intellectually wanton, ogling any subject that comes along. This was apparent on the first morning. Chad Trainer began the day with “Solitary, Poor, Nasty, Brutish and Short: Russell's View of Life Without World-Government”, a talk in which he compared Thomas Hobbes’ views on national governments with Russell’s views on world governments. Chad sees Russell adopting Hobbesian views on world government, despite Russell’s disapproval of Hobbes’ views on government. With the discovery that Ed Boedeker’s scheduled discussion of Logical Platonism and the Theory of Types had been cancelled, Cara Rice took the stand. Speaking on “Who Stole the Future?”, Cara discussed the allegations that Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World is based on the penultimate chapters of Russell’s earlier philosophical work The Scientific Outlook. Throughout his life Russell claimed that Huxley borrowed heavily from The Scientific Outlook; Cara, who carefully scrutinized his claim, came down on Russell’s side, along the way giving us insight into Russell’s views on science. Andrew Bone, of the Bertrand Russell Research Center, delivered the final talk before lunch. In “What Russell Got Wrong in the 1930s”, he discussed Russell’s pacifism leading up to World War II in the 1930s, suggesting that Russell’s acceptance of the need to stand up to Germany militarily was reluctant and slow in coming. Lunch break meant work for Board members: deciding the location of next year’s meeting (Iowa City) and the like: readers may consult the meeting minutes at the back of this issue for further details of the meeting. After lunch, BRS President Alan Schwerin led a master class in a debate on Russell’s essay “On Vagueness”, asking whether objects and not merely our knowledge of them can be vague. The debate was animated in its inability to agree as to what Russell thought was or wasn’t vague. Howard Blair followed with “Russell on the Structure of Spaces (and Times)”. A mathematician at Syracuse University, Blaire explained in lay terms how Russell constructed concepts such as number, continuity, space, and time from structures of relations, while demonstrating some problems with Russell’s views; it was a pleasure to have a mathematician share his point of view with us, as he did during his own talk and in later discussions. When Andrew Lugg addressed the Society with a talk on “Russell as a Precursor of Quine, Quine as a Follower of Russell”, he emphasized the similarities between the philosophies of W.O. Quine and Russell; he maintains that it makes more sense to view Quine as the last Russellian rather than as the last Logical Empiricist. Bernard Linsky followed with a description of his current research at the Russell Archives into the second edition of Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica, suggesting, among other things, that Russell merely experimented with the Wittgenstein-Ramsey views he is commonly thought to have embraced there. As the day progressed a mysterious television crew appeared, and began to interview Chad and others—about j’ne sais quoi! The afternoon saw a gradual ebbing of shyness, an impulse to mingle, and ties began to be forged between the ‘Others’ and us. The evening commenced, as custom demands, by imbibing thimbles of Red Hackle and chattering over supper, this time with several of the cerebral Meinongians as guests. Over dessert Tim Madigan entertained us with “What a Character – Bertrand Russell in Fiction.” On Sunday, Michael Potter began the session with a talk on “Impulse and Desire in Russell's Emotivism”, in which he examined the emotivism in Russell’s 1916 Principles of Social Reconstruction. David Goldman, psychiatrist and BRS board member, then shared his discipline’s perspective on Russell in ‘A Psychiatrist Looks at The Conquest of Happiness’. Following this, a panel consisting of Tim Madigan, Bob Riemenschneider, and Peter Stone came together to discuss “Harriet Ward's A Man of Small Importance”. Harriet Ward, it will be remembered, is the daughter of Dora Russell and Barry Griffin—Griffin is the “man of small im¬portance” referred to in the title of the book. In the book, Ward discusses the relations between Dora Russell, Bertrand Russell, and Griffin. A review of the discussion will be published in a future issue of the Quarterly. Concluding the conference with a bang, Stephen Heathorn, a historian at McMaster University, spoke on ‘The Eugenical Discourse in Russell’s Marriage and Morals’. Heathorn stated that his talk would show Russell’s thinking on eugenics up to the 1930 Marriage and Morals, but it delivered even more than was promised, giving us, in fact, a fairly comprehensive survey of the state of eugenic thought, along with Russell’s place in, it up to 1930. It was a delightful history lesson and a delightful note on which to end the conference. All in all, the weekend was a pleasant one indeed and made a strong case for combining BRS annual meetings with those of other groups in the future. our friends at Mind, the premier British journal of analytic philosophy, report that this October they are celebrating the centenary of Russell’s landmark article “On Denoting”, which they call “the most famous paper in analytical philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century”, with a special centenary issue of Mind. Their October 2005 Centenary Issue of Mind is edited by Stephen Neale and contains articles by Ray Buchanan and Gary Ostertag (‘Has the Problem of Incompleteness Rested on a Mistake?’), David Kaplan (‘Russell on Denoting’), Richard L. Cartwright (‘Remarks on Propositional Functions’), David Kaplan, Saul Kripke (Russell's Notion of Scope and the Hydra Problem), Alex Oliver and Timothy Smiley (‘Plural Descriptions and Many-valued Functions’), Nathan Salmon (‘On Designating’), Stephen Schiffer (‘Russell's Theory of Definite Descriptions’), and Zoltán Gendler Szabó (‘The Loss of Uniqueness’). To order, visit www.mind.oxfordjournals.org do tell! Warren Allen Smith has a collection of essays out—Gossip from Across the Pond. (chelCpress, P.O. Box 30196, New York, NY 10011, chelCpress@nyc.rr.com). Peter Stone sends us this report of it: Who says philosophers can’t enjoy gossip? That, in a nutshell, is the message of Gossip from Across the Pond, by longtime BRS member Warren Allen Smith. Gossip from Across the Pond collects a decade’s worth of Warren’s regular column from the British magazine Gay and Lesbian Humanist. The articles included cover a wide variety of topics, but all relate to two eternal subjects of gossip—who’s gay and who doesn’t believe in God. The reader encounters the “gay mafia” (p. 79), gay penguins (pp. 102, 106), Elton John checking into hotels under the name “Sir Colin Chihuahua” (p. 19), as well as plenty of humanist philosophy. Some is serious, as when Gore Vidal states, “I’m really interested now in trying to destroy monotheism in the United States. That is the source of all of the problems” (p. 8). Some is less so, as when mocking the idea that “the Good Lord works in mysterious ways” (pp. 42-43). There’s even the occasional reference to philosophy more traditionally conceived, although always spun in Warren’s inimical way. One involves Gore Vidal, Paul Newman, Nietzsche, and a horny army chaplain (p. 8). And what discussion of philosophy (gossipy or otherwise) would be complete without at least one reference to Russell? Warren tells of taking a house tour in which he met renowned architect Philip Johnson. “Johnson,” he writes, “asked me my occupation, and I replied that at the moment I was teaching Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian.... He knew Russell’s work well, so I asked if he was a naturalist. He said something to the effect that the word had many meanings but that he was no super-naturalist” (p. 121). It’s always good to know how successful Russell is as an ice¬breaker during house tours. All in all, this little book is an entertaining and refreshing journey into topics of interest to philosophers from an angle often pursued though seldom admitted. tim madigan remembers paul edwards (1923-2004): A member of the editorial board of Free Inquiry magazine and the International Academy of Humanism, Paul Edwards was born in Vienna, Austria. A gifted student, he was admitted to the prestigious Akademische Gymnasium. But after the Nazi annexation of Austria his family sent him to stay with friends in Scotland. He later went to Melbourne, Australia, where he studied philosophy at the University of Melbourne and was influenced by the analytic tradition that held sway there. After the war he came to Columbia University, where he completed a doctorate in philosophy. He was to spend the rest of his life in New York City, teaching at such institutions as New York University, the New School for Social Research, and Brooklyn College. Edwards is best known for editing the monumental Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which originally appeared in 1967 and has never since been out of print. It remains the essential reference work for the field of philosophy. Using his editorial prerogative, Edwards made sure that there were plentiful entries on atheism, materialism, and critiques of God's existence, and he himself wrote the long entry on his own philosophical hero, Bertrand Russell. In 1959, Edwards edited a collection of Russell's previously scattered writings dealing with religion, titled Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays, which became a seminal work in the promotion of unbelief. Those who knew Edwards will always remember his erudition and his wicked sense of humor. An admirer of Voltaire and Russell for their great wit, Edwards had a special fondness for the life and works of David Hume, the man he considered to be the best exemplar of a learned individual who lived life to the fullest and who remained to the day of his death a cheerful nonbeliever. Shortly before his death, Edwards published a collection of essays entitled Heidegger's Confusions, dedicated to demolishing the legacy of the man whom Edwards considered to have done the greatest damage to the field of philosophy in the twentieth century. He particularly abhorred Heidegger's confusing writings on the nature of death and his cryptic comment that, "only a God can save us now." For Edwards, such an expression was beneath contempt. Edwards also wrote a biting critique of reincarnation, Reincarnation: A Critical Examination. The volume he co-edited with Arthur Pap, A Modern Introduction to Philosophy, was one of the most influential textbooks ever published in the field, and contained copious selections from such unbelievers as Paul Rée, John Stuart Mill, Clarence Darrow, Bertrand Russell, David Hume, Ernest Nagel, and A. J. Ayer, as well as Edwards' own insightful introductions and annotations. Never one to hide his own unbelief, Edwards often commented that his two main goals were to demolish the influence of Heidegger and keep alive the memory of Wilhelm Reich, the much-reviled psychoanalyst whose critiques of religion Edwards felt remained valid. Edwards final book, God and the Philosophers, a summation of the views of all the major Western philosophers on the subject of the deity, will be published posthumously.
I was privileged to get to know Paul as a person. For many years no visit of mine to New York City was complete without stopping at Paul's huge apartment on Broadway and 72nd Street. He would regale me with stories about his teaching career, his various battles with his nemesis Sidney Hook, and the adventures he had in editing The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Given Paul's own biting wit, it's not surprising that he so admired Voltaire and Russell. He also had a great fondness for Benjamin Franklin, whose own wit is often unappreciated. Shortly before his death I told him about a television program devoted to Franklin—I hope that he was able to view it before his untimely demise. Paul was one of the last living links to the world of the Vienna Circle, and I miss him greatly.
|