|
after 27 years of remarkable service to the brs, our treasurer, dennis darland, has resigned from that position. More than anyone else, Dennis is responsible for having kept this Society on a steady keel and functioning reliably from one year to the next. Thank you, Dennis. We are grateful for everything you have done for us and won’t soon forget it. as of this writing, the Society is looking for someone replace Dennis as its treasurer. The only requirement for being treasurer that is stated in the Society bylaws is that you must have belonged to the Society for at least one year. If you fit that description and are interested in being the Society’s treasurer, please contact any BRS executive officer or board member at once. For the interim (until the BRS June Annual Meeting), ken blackwell will be acting treasurer of the Society. it's time to renew your membership to the Bertrand Russell Society! If you have not yet done so, we hope you will renew your membership now, using the form enclosed with this issue of the BRS Quarterly. For those wishing to pay their dues online using a credit card, you can now pay via PayPal. Just go to https://www.paypal.com and open a free account. When prompted for the recipient’s email address, enter brs-pp@sbcglobal.net. There is no charge to make PayPal payments, which – foreign members take note – will be handled in US dollars. When prompted for a message to send to our treasurer, state the purpose of the payment and any change of address but do not include your credit card information. Our treasurer will send you an email receipt and update the membership records accordingly. CURIOUS TO KNOW WHO’S NEW ON THE BOARD OF THE BRS? The fall election results for the Russell Society Board of Directors are as follows: Ken Blackwell (28 votes), David Blitz (28 votes), Philip Ebersole (26 votes), David Henehan (27 votes), Kevin Klement (28 votes), Tom Stanley (29 votes), Russell Wahl (27 votes) and David White (26 votes).The election results were not much of a surprise – eight people were elected from a slate of eight candidates. But two of those elected, Kevin Klement and Russell Wahl, are new to the board. It is healthy for the Society to have fresh voices on its executive board and a quick look at the recent past shows a reassuring regularity to this influx of new people on the board. In the 2005 election, Gregory Landini and John Ongley were elected to the board both for the first time, and Marvin Kohl (board chair from 1989 to 1995) was re-elected to it after a long absence. In 2003 David Blitz and David Henehan were both elected to the board for the first time, in 2002 Andrew Bone and Cara Rice were new board members, in 2002 Rosalind Carey was elected for the first time, and the pattern continues back to the founding of the Society in 1974. A list of Society Board members going back to 1995 can be found at: http://www.user.drew.edu/~jlenz/BRS_Officers_past.htm. If you have any information as to who was on the Society’s board of directors before that, please contact the editors of this journal and those names will be added to this list at the Society’s website. COMING SOON! THE 34TH ANNUAL MEETING OF THE BRS! This happy event, hosted by BRS President Alan Schwerin, returns to Monmouth University in New Jersey June 8 10, 2007. Rooms are available on campus for the event, but space is limited, so contact Alan at aschweri@monmouth.edu soon with your requests. Details of the meeting will follow, but if the future resembles the past it will be a weekend of engaging talks, good company and an overall good time. We hope to see all of you there.a call for annual meeting papers. The annual meeting’s success turns in large part on its papers, and for this we need you. Are you working on a paper or presentation? Do you have an idea that would be a hot topic for the annual meeting? Share it with us! How about running a seminar on readings from Russell that you have found interesting? The master classes have all been well attended in the past and generate a good deal of response from the floor. So be sure to contact BRS President Alan Schwerin soon (at aschweri@monmouth.edu) with your ideas and contributions on Russell's thought and his life. They will be most welcome. call for apa papers. If you’re interested in reading a paper on Russell at the BRS session or on the history of early analytic philosophy at the HEAPS session of the Eastern or Central meetings of the APA (in Baltimore December 27-30, 2007 and at the Palmer House in Chicago April 14-20, 2008 respectively), please be sure to contact Rosalind Carey (rosalind.carey@lehman.cuny.edu) about it soon. (HEAPS is the History of Early Analytic Philosophy Society that often co-hosts APA sessions with the BRS.) russell speech on the internet. The Bertrand Russell Society Librarian, tom stanley, reports that Russell's 1959 address to the CND is available for download as ‘Bertrand Russell on the Arms Race’ from the website of the Talking History Project at: http://www.albany.edu/talkinghistory/arch2006july-december.html. Here is their description of the speech: “Bertrand Russell, the Nobel prize-winning philosopher, mathematician, and author, became a vocal critic of the arms race in the post-WWII Cold War era. In this selection of a speech on nuclear disarmament, first recorded in Manchester England on May Day of 1959, Russell expressed some of his concerns about the fate of humanity in the face of the growing arms race.” The speech is approximately 12 minutes in length. Tom also reports that there are a large number of speeches, interviews and other recordings by Russell that are available for downloading from sveinbjorn thordarson's excellent Russell webpages at: http://www.sveinbjorn.org/russell. These recordings include many of the Woodrow Wyatt interviews with Russell, and an audio book of readings from Russell’s Religion and Science. alan schwerin, president of the brs, has recently had a new collection of papers on Russell accepted for publication. It is scheduled to be published January 2008 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing and will be called Revisiting Russell: Critical Reflections on the Thought of Bertrand Russell. It will include papers from the past two annual meetings of the BRS. This volume follows an earlier collection of essays edited by Schwerin from Bertrand Russell Society annual meetings called Bertrand Russell on Nuclear War, Peace, and Language: Critical and Historical Essays. There is an online review by david blitz of this earlier volume at: http://russell.mcmaster.ca/blitz_schwerin.pdf. ethan houser, an american sculptor now living in Mexico City, has just completed a sculpture bust of Bertrand Russell. He describes it as depicting “a younger Russell with a suppressed smile at the height of his productive life” and says that it is a piece he has wanted to do for a long time. The piece is 31 cm. high (slightly over 12'') and will be cast in bronze, given a deep rich 19th century type patina, and mounted on a base of black granite. The base will bring the total height of the piece to around 17''. It will be a signed, hand numbered limited edition piece and no more than forty will ever be cast, with a price “under $2,000 USD”. Ethan Houser can be contacted at ethantaliesin@yahoo.com. finally, brs member mike beaney will be publishing a collection of essays on analysis sometime next year with Routledge. It will be called The Analytic Turn: Analysis in Early Analytic Philosophy and Phenomenology and will include the following essays on Russell, along with a host of essays on a wide variety of related analysts and topics: ‘Frege-Russell Numbers: Analysis or Explication?’ by Erich H. Reck, ‘Analysis and Abstraction Principles in Russell and Frege’ by James Levine, ‘Some Remarks on Russell’s Early Decompositional Style of Analysis’ by nichaolas Griffin, ‘“On Denoting” and the Idea of a Logically Perfect Language’ by Peter Hylton and ‘Logical Analysis and Logical Construction’ by Bernard Linsky. |