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I very much enjoyed Justin Lieber’s account of his philosophical education at the University of Chicago in the 1950s and the differences between Russell and Wittgenstein in his essay “Russell and Wittgenstein: A Study in Civility and Arrogance”,1 but he makes two remarks in passing which I believe should be corrected. These corrections do not affect his main interpretative claim about Russell’s and Wittgenstein’s personalities. First, Lieber claims that the result of the Wittgenstein-Waismann collaboration, The Principles of Linguistic Philosophy, “was in galley proofs in the late 1930s when Wittgenstein finally put his foot (or jackboot) down, using his considerable influence on Waismann and the press to stop publication” (16). However, one of the foremost experts on the Waismann-Wittgenstein relationship, Gordon Baker, has recently claimed “The German invasion of Holland scuppered the publication of the German text of the book. For unknown reasons the scheme for publishing the English translation was aborted.” 2 There is no evidence that I am aware of that Wittgenstein’s misgivings about Waismann’s manuscript were the reason for its failure to appear as planned. Second, Lieber repeats a common misunderstanding of Russell’s reactions to Wittgenstein’s criticism of the Theory of Knowledge manuscript in the spring of 1913, stating that it “affected Russell so deeply that he felt, for many years, that he was incapable of serious technical philosophical work (the manuscript itself was not published until years after Russell’s death). Russell turned to writing on political and social topics and fiction” (18). This view of how Russell reacted can most likely be traced to Russell’s infamous 1916 letter to Ottoline Morrell, reprinted in his Autobiography, where he laments that “I saw that I could not hope ever again to do fundamental work in philosophy. My impulse was shattered, like a wave dashed to pieces against a breakwater.” 3 Even the hyperbole of this letter should not lead us to ignore the fact that Russell wrote some of his most interesting and influential material in the period between June 1913 and the composition of this letter. These include the lectures published as Our Knowledge of the External World as a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy and the papers “The Relation of Sense-Data to Physics”, “On Scientific Method in Philosophy” and “The Ultimate Constituents of Matter”.4 While perhaps it is possible that Russell did not view this as “fundamental work in philosophy”, we should certainly classify it as “serious technical philosophical work”.
Department of Philosophy * Received January 17, 2005. 1 Bertrand Russell Society Quarterly no. 122 (May 2004): 11-22 2 L. Wittgenstein & F. Waismann, The Voices of Wittgenstein: The Vienna Circle, G. Baker (ed.). New York: Routledge, 2003, p. xxi. 3 B. Russell, Autobiography. New York: Routledge, 1998, 282, quoted at J. Slater (ed.), The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, volume 8. London: Allen & Unwin, 1986, pp. xix-xx. See also N. Griffin (ed.), The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell: The Public Years, 1914-1970. New York: Routledge, 2001, p. 114.
4 B. Russell, Our Knowledge. Chicago: Open Court, 1914. The papers mentioned have been reprinted in J. Slater (ed.), op. cit.
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